Biology subjects

Petersen, C. P.

Publications and source records attributed to Petersen, C. P..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2018

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

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.\n\nOne Sentence SummaryHomeostatic tissue maintenance can occur independent of precise positional information in planarians.

developmental biology↗

bioRxiv2017

A core signaling mechanism at the origin of animal nociception

All animals must detect noxious stimuli to initiate protective behavior, but the evolutionary origin of nociceptive systems is not well understood. Here, we show that a remarkably conserved signaling mechanism mediates the detection of noxious stimuli in animals as diverse as flatworms and humans. Planarian flatworms are amongst the simplest bilateral animals with a centralized nervous system, and capable of directed behavior. We demonstrate that noxious heat and irritant chemicals elicit robust escape behaviors in the planarian Schmidtea mediterranea, and that the conserved ion channel TRPA1 is required for these responses. TRPA1 mutant fruit flies (Drosophila) are also defective in the avoidance of noxious heat 1-3. Unexpectedly, we find that either the planarian or the human TRPA1 can restore noxious heat avoidance to TRPA1 mutant Drosophila, even though neither is directly activated by heat. Instead, our data suggest that TRPA1 activation is mediated by H2O2/Reactive Oxygen Species, early markers of tissue damage rapidly produced as a result of heat exposure. Together, our data reveal a core function for TRPA1 in noxious heat transduction, demonstrate its conservation from planarians to humans, and imply that human nociceptive systems may share a common ancestry with those of most extant animals, tracing back their origin to a progenitor that lived more than 500 million years ago.

neuroscience↗