bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.19.431962; this version posted February 19, 2021. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. A single cell atlas of human teeth Pierfrancesco Pagella,1,+ Laura de Vargas Roditi,2,3,+ Bernd Stadlinger, 4 Andreas E. Moor, 2,3,* Thimios A. Mitsiadis1,* 1 Orofacial Development and Regeneration, Institute of Oral Biology, Center of Dental Medicine, University of Zurich, Zurich, Swit- zerland. 2 Institute of Molecular Cancer Research, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland 3 Current address: Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, Basel, Switzerland 4 Clinic of Cranio-Maxillofacial and Oral Surgery, University of Zurich, University Hospital Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. + These authors contributed equally to this work. *Correspondence should be addressed to T.M. (
[email protected]), A.M. (
[email protected]) Teeth exert fundamental functions related to mastication and speech. Despite their great biomedical importance, an overall picture of their cellular and molecular composition is still missing. In this study, we have mapped the transcriptional landscape of the various cell populations that compose human teeth at single-cell resolution, and we analyzed in deeper detail their stem cell populations and their microenvironment. Our study identified great cellular heterogeneity in the dental pulp and the periodontium. Unexpectedly, we found that the molecular signatures of the stem cell populations were very similar, and that their distinctive behavior could be due to substantial differences between their microenvironments.