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Reactivating head regrowth in a regeneration-deficient planarian species

Nature volume 500, pages 81–84 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

Species capable of regenerating lost body parts occur throughout the animal kingdom, yet close relatives are often regeneration incompetent1,2. Why in the face of ‘survival of the fittest’ some animals regenerate but others do not remains a fascinating question3. Planarian flatworms are well known and studied for their ability to regenerate from minute tissue pieces, yet species with limited regeneration abilities have been described even amongst planarians4. Here we report the characterization of the regeneration defect in the planarian Dendrocoelum lacteum and its successful rescue. Tissue fragments cut from the posterior half of the body of this species are unable to regenerate a head and ultimately die5. We find that this defect originates during the early stages of head specification, which require inhibition of canonical Wnt signalling in other planarian species6,7,8. Notably, RNA interference (RNAi)-mediated knockdown of Dlac-β-catenin-1, the Wnt signal transducer, restored the regeneration of fully functional heads on tail pieces, rescuing D. lacteum’s regeneration defect. Our results demonstrate the utility of comparative studies towards the reactivation of regenerative abilities in regeneration-deficient animals. Furthermore, the availability of D. lacteum as a regeneration-impaired planarian model species provides a first step towards elucidating the evolutionary mechanisms that ultimately determine why some animals regenerate and others do not.

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Figure 1: D. lacteum cannot regenerate heads posteriorly.
Figure 2: Posterior D. lacteum wounds form a blastema.
Figure 3: Posterior D. lacteum wounds cannot re-specify tissue identity.
Figure 4: Rescue of the D. lacteum regeneration defect by β-catenin1 (RNAi).

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Accessions

GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ

Data deposits

The ddDlac transcriptome assembly is available at http://publications.mpi-cbg.de/5330-site. Time-course RNA-seq reads and named gene sequences have been deposited at GenBank/DDBJ/EMBL under the accession numbers GAKU00000000 (D. lacteum) and GAKV00000000 (S. mediterranea).

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Acknowledgements

We thank H. Andreas for expert animal care and colleagues at the MPI-CBG for comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Pfotenhauerstraße 108, 01307 Dresden, Germany,

    S.-Y. Liu, M. Vila-Farré, H. Brandl, N. Lakshmanaperumal, I. Henry & J. C. Rink

  2. DFG-Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD), Cluster of Excellence, Technische Universität Dresden, Fetscherstrasse 105, 01307 Dresden, Germany,

    C. Selck, B. Friedrich, R. Lutz & J. C. Rink

  3. Deep Sequencing Group-SFB655, DFG-Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD), Cluster of Excellence, Biotechnology Center (Biotec), Technische Universität Dresden, Fetscherstraße 105, 01307 Dresden, Germany,

    A. Dahl

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Contributions

S.-Y.L., C.S., B.F., R.L. and M.V.-F. carried out experiments; A.D. contributed RNA sequencing; S.-Y.L., H.B., N.L. and I.H. carried out bioinformatics analyses; J.C.R. designed the experiments and wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to J. C. Rink.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Figures 1-14 and additional references. (PDF 9659 kb)

Supplementary Table 1

This file contains a list of the Dlac orthologues and their corresponding transcript ID. (XLSX 13 kb)

Supplementary Table 2

This file contains the primer sequences. (XLSX 32 kb)

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Liu, SY., Selck, C., Friedrich, B. et al. Reactivating head regrowth in a regeneration-deficient planarian species. Nature 500, 81–84 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12414

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