Regenerative neurogenic response from glia requires insulin driven neuron-glia communication
Abstract
Understanding how injury to the Central Nervous System (CNS) induces de novo neurogenesis in animals would help promote regeneration in humans. Regenerative neurogenesis could originate from glia and glial Neuron-Glia antigen-2 (NG2) may sense injury-induced neuronal signals, but these are unknown. Here, we used Drosophila to search for genes functionally related the NG2 homologue kon-tiki (kon), and identified Islet Antigen-2 (Ia-2), required in neurons for insulin secretion. Alterations in Ia-2 function induced neural stem cell gene expression, injury increased ia-2 expression and induced ectopic neural stem cells. Using genetic analysis and lineage tracing, we demonstrate that Ia-2 and Kon regulate Drosophila insulin-like peptide 6 (Dilp-6), to induce glial proliferation and neural stem cells from glia. Ectopic neural stem cells can divide, and limited de novo neurogenesis could be traced back to glial cells. Altogether, Ia-2 and Dilp-6 drive a neuron-glia relay that restores glia, and reprograms glia into neural stem cells for regeneration.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
-
Single cell transcriptome atlas of the Drosophila larval brainNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE134722.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BB/L008343/1)
- Neale J Harrison
- Marta Moreira
- Alicia Hidalgo
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BB/R00871X/1)
- Marta Moreira
- Alicia Hidalgo
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (MIBTP Studentship)
- Elizabeth Connolly
Marie Curie International Incoming Post-Doctoral Fellowship (TOLKEDA)
- Jun Sun
- Alicia Hidalgo
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2021, Harrison 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.
Metrics
-
- 2,951
- views
-
- 395
- downloads
-
- 15
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Developmental Biology
- Neuroscience
We established a volumetric trans-scale imaging system with an ultra-large field-of-view (FOV) that enables simultaneous observation of millions of cellular dynamics in centimeter-wide three-dimensional (3D) tissues and embryos. Using a custom-made giant lens system with a magnification of ×2 and a numerical aperture (NA) of 0.25, and a CMOS camera with more than 100 megapixels, we built a trans-scale scope AMATERAS-2, and realized fluorescence imaging with a transverse spatial resolution of approximately 1.1 µm across an FOV of approximately 1.5×1.0 cm2. The 3D resolving capability was realized through a combination of optical and computational sectioning techniques tailored for our low-power imaging system. We applied the imaging technique to 1.2 cm-wide section of mouse brain, and successfully observed various regions of the brain with sub-cellular resolution in a single FOV. We also performed time-lapse imaging of a 1-cm-wide vascular network during quail embryo development for over 24 hr, visualizing the movement of over 4.0×105 vascular endothelial cells and quantitatively analyzing their dynamics. Our results demonstrate the potential of this technique in accelerating production of comprehensive reference maps of all cells in organisms and tissues, which contributes to understanding developmental processes, brain functions, and pathogenesis of disease, as well as high-throughput quality check of tissues used for transplantation medicine.
-
- Developmental Biology
- Evolutionary Biology
Seahorses, pipefishes, and seadragons are fishes from the family Syngnathidae that have evolved extraordinary traits including male pregnancy, elongated snouts, loss of teeth, and dermal bony armor. The developmental genetic and cellular changes that led to the evolution of these traits are largely unknown. Recent syngnathid genome assemblies revealed suggestive gene content differences and provided the opportunity for detailed genetic analyses. We created a single-cell RNA sequencing atlas of Gulf pipefish embryos to understand the developmental basis of four traits: derived head shape, toothlessness, dermal armor, and male pregnancy. We completed marker gene analyses, built genetic networks, and examined the spatial expression of select genes. We identified osteochondrogenic mesenchymal cells in the elongating face that express regulatory genes bmp4, sfrp1a, and prdm16. We found no evidence for tooth primordia cells, and we observed re-deployment of osteoblast genetic networks in developing dermal armor. Finally, we found that epidermal cells expressed nutrient processing and environmental sensing genes, potentially relevant for the brooding environment. The examined pipefish evolutionary innovations are composed of recognizable cell types, suggesting that derived features originate from changes within existing gene networks. Future work addressing syngnathid gene networks across multiple stages and species is essential for understanding how the novelties of these fish evolved.