Grant: Operating Grant

Every year 500-600 infants are born in Canada with cleft lip and/or cleft palate. These serious birth defects require a number of surgeries beginning in infancy and carrying on until adulthood. In addition there are major dental challenges such as the need to replace missing teeth and correct jaw misalignments. The main reason clefts occur is that growth is insufficient to allow contact between neighbouring facial prominences in the early embryo. In this grant we focus on a genes that causes human clefting, TBX22 and determine the mechanisms by which this gene inhibits outgrowth using the chicken embryo model. The significance is that we will arrive at a better understanding of the genes and molecules that control facial development. The long term goal is to reduce the severity of and to prevent orofacial clefting.