Dr. Yara Haridi

Dentine is our sensitive tissue.

That's why if you take care of your enamel and your gums, usually your teeth are okay.

Because when your dentine is exposed, it's the sensitive tissue.

Okay, so now we know odontodes have dentine and we know that teeth have dentine.

But we don't know if odontodes outside the mouth are sensitive.

And so this is where I took a really weird tangent that I want to tell you about.

So remember when I told you that sharks have odontodes?

They're covered in these little bits.

The other ones that have odontodes are catfish.

And so, you know, like a little pleco, those like algae eating little fish that you get in your aquarium?

Yeah.

So those guys are covered in odontos too.

They're covered in little teeth.

What?

Bizarre.

And they are super easy to keep and super common.

So I went to a pet store and I got a bunch of them.

Oh my God.

And I started breeding them in the lab to get their little embryos so we could actually test if...

if their odontodes are innervated, because that would be the first step for them to be actually sensory.