Planarian immobilization, partial irradiation, and tissue transplantation.

The planarian, a freshwater flatworm, has proven to be a powerful system for dissecting metazoan regeneration and stem cell biology. Planarian regeneration of any missing or damaged tissues is made possible by adult stem cells termed neoblasts. Although these stem cells have been definitively shown to be pluripotent and singularly capable of reconstituting an entire animal, the heterogeneity within the stem cell population and the dynamics of their cellular behaviors remain largely unresolved.

Amputation induces stem cell mobilization to sites of injury during planarian regeneration.

How adult stem cell populations are recruited for tissue renewal and repair is a fundamental question of biology. Mobilization of stem cells out of their niches followed by correct migration and differentiation at a site of tissue turnover or injury are important requirements for proper tissue maintenance and regeneration. However, we understand little about the mechanisms that control this process, possibly because the best studied vertebrate adult stem cell systems are not readily amenable to in vivo observation.

Mouse models of hematopoietic engraftment: limitations of transgenic green fluorescent protein strains and a high-performance liquid chromatography approach to analysis of erythroid chimerism.

Transgenic mouse strains ubiquitously expressing green fluorescent protein (GFP) have enabled investigators to develop in vivo transplant models that can detect donor contributions to many different tissues. However, most GFP transgenics lack expression of the reporter in the erythroid lineage. We evaluated expression of GFP in the bone marrow of the OsbY01 transgenic mouse (B6-GFP) in the context of CD71 and TER-119 expression and found that GFP fluorescence is lost prior to the basophilic erythroblast stage of development.