Positional information specifies the site of organ regeneration and not tissue maintenance in planarians

  1. Eric M Hill
  2. Christian P Petersen  Is a corresponding author
  1. Northwestern University, United States

Abstract

Most animals undergo homeostatic tissue maintenance, yet those capable of robust regeneration in adulthood use mechanisms significantly overlapping with homeostasis. Here we show in planarians that modulations to body-wide patterning systems shift the target site for eye regeneration while still enabling homeostasis of eyes outside this region. The uncoupling of homeostasis and regeneration, which can occur during normal positional rescaling after axis truncation, is not due to altered injury signaling or stem cell activity, nor specific to eye tissue. Rather, pre-existing tissues, which are misaligned with patterning factor expression domains, compete with properly located organs for incorporation of migratory progenitors. These observations suggest that patterning factors determine sites of organ regeneration but do not solely determine the location of tissue homeostasis. These properties provide candidate explanations for how regeneration integrates pre-existing tissues and how regenerative abilities could be lost in evolution or development without eliminating long-term tissue maintenance and repair.

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Author details

  1. Eric M Hill

    Department of Molecular Biosciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-1426-2573
  2. Christian P Petersen

    Department of Molecular Biosciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, United States
    For correspondence
    christian-p-petersen@northwestern.edu
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-7552-6865

Funding

National Institutes of Health (1DP2DE024365-01)

  • Christian P Petersen

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

© 2018, Hill & Petersen

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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  1. Eric M Hill
  2. Christian P Petersen
(2018)
Positional information specifies the site of organ regeneration and not tissue maintenance in planarians
eLife 7:e33680.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.33680

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https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.33680