Developmental dependence for functional eye regrowth in Xenopus laevis

Cindy X. Kha; Kelly Ai-Sun Tseng

doi:10.4103/1673-5374.238611

摘要：Introduction:A key challenge in designing tissue repair strategies is knowing whether and how developmental mech-anisms are used for successful repair of mature/adult tissues. Although it is known that developmental components are used in repair, it remains mostly unclear which ones are re-quired and whether they act similarly as during development.This issue is further complicated by the fact that it is difficult to assess the similarities and differences between develop-ment and the repair of mature tissues, since the two contexts are highly dissimilar. A potentially useful yet underutilized approach is to understand developmental regrowth (defined here as the ability to compensate for missing tissues by restor-ing normal organ structures and function). An ideal model would have two key features: repair capacity in the organ of interest during development, and well-understood develop-mental mechanisms. This approach reduces the complexity of comparing mature repair processes to developmental ones.The African clawed frog,Xenopus laevis, has a high capacity to restore lost body structures, including the eye (Beck et al., 2009). It can regenerate the retina and lens after injury (re-viewed in Barbosa-Sabanero et al. (2012) and Tseng (2017)), andXenopus eye development is well characterized with known mechanisms (Viczian and Zuber, 2015).