Hedgehog signaling regulates gene expression in planarian glia
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States
- Stanford University, United States
Abstract
Hedgehog signaling is critical for vertebrate central nervous system (CNS) development, but its role in CNS biology in other organisms is poorly characterized. In the planarian Schmidtea mediterranea, hedgehog (hh) is expressed in medial cephalic ganglia neurons, suggesting a possible role in CNS maintenance or regeneration. We performed RNA sequencing of planarian brain tissue following RNAi of hh and patched (ptc), which encodes the Hh receptor. Two misregulated genes, intermediate filament-1 (if-1) and calamari (cali), were expressed in a previously unidentified non-neural CNS cell type. These cells expressed orthologs of astrocyte-associated genes involved in neurotransmitter uptake and metabolism, and extended processes enveloping regions of high synapse concentration. We propose that these cells are planarian glia. Planarian glia were distributed broadly, but only expressed if-1 and cali in the neuropil near hh+ neurons. Planarian glia and their regulation by Hedgehog signaling present a novel tractable system for dissection of glia biology.
Data availability
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Gene expression profiling of planarian heads or cephalic ganglia after inhibition of Hedgehog signaling pathway genes by RNAiPublicly available at the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (accession no: GSE81059).
Article and author information
Author details
Thomas R Clandinin
Funding
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Peter W Reddien
National Institutes of Health (R01GM080639)
- Peter W Reddien
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2016, Wang et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Hedgehog signaling regulates gene expression in planarian glia
eLife 5:e16996.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.16996
