Project description:In contrast to mammals, zebrafish has high capacity to regenerate tissue architecture and replace lost neurons after traumatic brain injury. The ependymoglia cells react to the injury and generate new neurons, which migrate to the lessoned site and contribute to the tissue restoration. Understanding molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying this regenerative neurogenesis is the crucial step towards achieving regenerative therapies in the mammalian brain. In order to identify molecular pathways governing this mode of restorative neurogenesis, we analysed changes in the transcriptome of ependymoglia cells and their progeny during regeneration process and identified Aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) to be involved in regulation of ependymoglia differentiation towards post-mitotic neurons. Our in vivo imaging analysis shows that the high AhR signalling promotes direct conversion of newly identified population of ependymoglia into the post-mitotic neurons. In contrast, decrease in AhR signalling promotes ependymoglial proliferation. Interestingly, we observed inactivation of the AhR signalling shortly after the injury and return to the basal levels 7 days post injury (dpi) suggesting the role of AhR in proper timing of the direct conversion of ependymoglia, ensuring the successful repair. Taken together, we identified the role of AhR signalling pathway in regulating differentiation of ependymoglia into the neurons and setting up the proper timing of restorative neurogenesis in zebrafish brain.
Project description:Knockdown of a zebrafish aryl hydrocarbon receptor repressor (ahrra) affects expression of genes related to photoreceptor development and hematopoiesis.
Project description:To find the signalling pathway involved in WT/2D2 CD4+ gut T cell (CD4+ intraepithelial lymphocytes, CD4+IEL) differentiation, particulary to determine whether aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) pathway is involved.
Project description:Adult zebrafish have the ability to recover from spinal cord injury and exhibit re-growth of descending axons from the brainstem to the spinal cord. We performed gene expression analysis using microarray to find damage-induced genes after spinal cord injury, which shows that Sox11b mRNA is up-regulated at 11 days after injury. However, the functional relevance of Sox11b for regeneration is not known. Here, we report that the up-regulation of Sox11b mRNA after spinal cord injury is mainly localized in ependymal cells lining the central canal and in newly differentiating neuronal precursors or immature neurons. Using an in vivo morpholino-based gene knockout approach, we demonstrate that Sox11b is essential for locomotor recovery after spinal cord injury. In the injured spinal cord, expression of the neural stem cell associated gene, Nestin, and the proneural gene Ascl1a (Mash1a), which are involved in the self-renewal and cell fate specification of endogenous neural stem cells, respectively, is regulated by Sox11b. Our data indicate that Sox11b promotes neuronal determination of endogenous stem cells and regenerative neurogenesis after spinal cord injury in the adult zebrafish. Enhancing Sox11b expression to promote proliferation and neurogenic determination of endogenous neural stem cells after injury may be a promising strategy in restorative therapy after spinal cord injury in mammals. Spinal cord injury or control sham injury was performed on adult zebrafish. After 4, 12, or 264 hrs, a 5 mm segment of spinal cord was dissected and processed (as a pool from 5 animals) in three replicate groups for each time point and treatment.
Project description:Zebrafish are an important model organism with inherent advantages that have the potential to make zebrafish a widely applied model for the study of energy homeostasis and obesity. The small size of zebrafish allows for assays on embryos to be conducted in a 96- or 384-well plate format, Morpholino and CRISPR based technologies promote ease of genetic manipulation, and drug treatment by bath application is viable. Moreover, zebrafish are ideal for forward genetic screens allowing for novel gene discovery. Given the relative novelty of zebrafish as a model for obesity, it is necessary to develop tools that fully exploit these benefits. Herein, we describe a method to measure energy expenditure in thousands of embryonic zebrafish simultaneously. We have developed a whole animal microplate platform in which we use 96-well plates to isolate individual fish and we assess cumulative NADH2 production using the commercially available cell culture viability reagent alamarBlue. In poikilotherms the relationship between NADH2 production and energy expenditure is tightly linked. This energy expenditure assay creates the potential to rapidly screen pharmacological or genetic manipulations that directly alter energy expenditure or alter the response to an applied drug (e.g. insulin sensitizers).