Reciprocal analyses in zebrafish and medaka reveal that harnessing the immune response promotes cardiac regeneration
- Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research, Germany
- University of Bristol, United Kingdom
Abstract
Zebrafish display a distinct ability to regenerate their heart following injury. However, this ability is not shared by another teleost, the medaka. In order to identify cellular and molecular bases for this difference, we performed comparative transcriptomic analyses following cardiac cryoinjury. This comparison points to major differences in immune cell dynamics between these models. Upon closer examination, we observed delayed and reduced macrophage recruitment in medaka, along with delayed neutrophil clearance. To investigate the role of immune responses in cardiac regeneration, we delayed macrophage recruitment in zebrafish and observed compromised neovascularization, neutrophil clearance, cardiomyocyte proliferation and scar resolution. In contrast, stimulating Toll-like receptor signaling in medaka enhanced immune cell dynamics and promoted neovascularization, neutrophil clearance, cardiomyocyte proliferation and scar resolution. Altogether, these data provide further insight into the complex role of the immune response during regeneration, and serve as a platform to identify and test additional regulators of cardiac repair.
Data availability
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Comparative transcriptome profiling of zebrafish and medaka hearts following cardiac cryoinjuryPublicly available at the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (accession no: GSE94617).
Article and author information
Author details
Didier YR Stainier
Funding
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Open-access funding)
- Didier YR Stainier
The funder had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All zebrafish and medaka husbandry was performed under standard conditions, and all animal experiments were done in accordance with institutional (MPG) and national ethical and animal welfare guidelines approved by the ethics committee for animal experiments at the Regierungspräsidium Darmstadt, Germany (permit numbers B2-1023 and B2-1111).
Copyright
© 2017, Stainier 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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Reciprocal analyses in zebrafish and medaka reveal that harnessing the immune response promotes cardiac regeneration
eLife 6:e25605.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.25605
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