Dental Pulp Defence and Repair Mechanisms in Dental Caries

Figure 3

Tables ((a) and (b)) showing the key functions associated with the 16 and 3 molecular networks identified as being significantly activated (≥ 6 focus genes) in carious and healthy pulpal tissue, respectively. Shading of boxes indicates the networks which associated with the function and hence supported its inclusion as being active. Analysis was performed using the Ingenuity Pathways Analysis (IPA) software (http://www.ingenuity.com/products/ipa) on the high-throughput datasets reported in McLachlan et al. [11]. Sixteen and three functional categories were identified as being activated in carious diseased and healthy pulpal tissues, respectively. Carious diseased pulp tissue clearly demonstrated increased molecular network and functional activity compared with healthy pulpal tissue. Asterisks () in (a) indicate functions which are associated with immune system cells (as identified by IPA); notably some evidence of hard tissue repair function was also evident (). Ontological functions identified in (b) likely associate with pulp tissue homeostatic processes. Image (c) shows an example network (network 1 from the carious pulp tissue dataset) which also shows the subcellular localisation of the molecules that were identified as differentially expressed. The activation of this network via intracellular signalling cascades results in the elaboration of key inflammatory-associated chemokines, such as CXCL8 (IL-8) and CCL2, and the matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) 1 and 9.

(a) Carious diseased pulp

(b) Healthy pulp

(c)