Abstract
Germ cell acts as a link between transfer of genetic information and process of species evolution. Defects or malformations of germ cells can lead to infertility or tumors. Germ cell regeneration is one of the effective ways to treat the infertility. Therefore, it is of great scientific and clinical interests to dissect the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying germ cell regeneration. Progress have already been achieved in germ cell regeneration using model organisms for decades. However, key open issues regarding the underpinning mechanisms still remain poorly understood. Zebrafish is well known for its powerful regenerative capacity to regenerate various tissues and organs. Recently, advances in genomics, genetics, microscopy, and single cell technologies have made zebrafish an attractive model to study germ cell development and regeneration. Here we review recent technologies for the study of germ cell regeneration in zebrafish, highlight the potential of germline stem cells (GSCs) in the contribution to reproductive system regeneration, and discuss the nanos. Wnt signaling and germ cell-specific factors involved in the regulation of germ cell regeneration.
Highlights
Infertility is estimated to affect more than 186 million people in the world (Inhorn and Patrizio, 2015)
Zebrafish homologous gene nanos3 is expressed in oocytes, but nanos3 mutation leads to loss of ovarian germline stem cells (GSCs) and sex-reversal, suggesting that nanos3 is essential for the maintenance of ovarian GSCs in zebrafish (Draper et al, 2007; Beer and Draper, 2013). nanos2 is expressed in the spermatogonia at the earliest stage of the mouse testis and is required for maintaining spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs). nanos2 maintains its long-term stem cell state by inhibiting the specialization of GSC (Sada et al, 2009)
Progress have been achieved in germ cell regeneration by using zebrafish as an animal model and contributed to the development of this field
Summary
Infertility is estimated to affect more than 186 million people in the world (Inhorn and Patrizio, 2015). These studies reported that using 5 mM MTZ to treat the Tg(zp:GFPNTR) transgenic line zebrafish females at 28 day post-fertilization (dpf) for 2 weeks caused infertility due to complete apoptosis of their germ cells (Hu et al, 2010), whereas other study used the same method to treat the adult Tg(zpc:g4vp16/uas:nfsbmcherry) transgenic background females and found that a large number of oocytes were killed, but 1 month later the ovaries could recover completely to regain their reproductive functions (Figure 1A) (White et al, 2011). MTZ was able to induce male infertility by targeted germ cells ablation in the testes of Tg(asp:GPF-NTR), Tg(sam:GPF-NTR) and Tg(odf:GPF-NTR) transgenic background zebrafish (Figure 1D) (Hsu et al, 2010).
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