Regeneration, reproduction and laboratory maintenance of aquatic and land planarians from Ecuador

Understanding the cellular processes that explain tissue regeneration strategies in aquatic and land planarians is of great importance to understand how this process has changed from a primitive aquatic environment to a terrestrial one. Although great advances in planarian’s biology have been made at an organismal, cellular and molecular level, many species remain understudied or undescribed. Here, we report some regeneration aspects of a new freshwater planarian species from Ecuador. For this, we have collected, maintained and identified animals to study regeneration through surgical and molecular methods. This sexual species from the Genus Girardia has strong regenerative capabilities, similar to those reported for Schmidtea mediterranea. A spatial and temporal analysis of mitosis in regenerating fragments in Girardia sp. allowed us to observe a biphasic pattern by 6 h and 48 h in posterior fragments. Differently, anterior fragments presented only the first peak (6 h). To better understand this process in other the poorly studied land planarians, we have identified Geoplaninae sp., which also has strong regenerative capabilities. This land species is able to regenerate in almost one month (24 days). We concluded that Girardia sp. is an ideal model to study regeneration at a cellular and molecular level, which enable us to start comparative analyses with freshwater and land planarians (e.g., Geoplaninae sp.) species that present different regeneration responses.

• Hovedforfatter: Oviedo Rivadeneira, Emilio Atahualpa (author)
• Format: bachelorThesis
• Udgivet: 2019
• Fag: Invertebrados - platelmintos; aquatic land planarians from Ecuador; reproduction; diversity; regeneration
• Online adgang: https://repositorio.puce.edu.ec/handle/123456789/20721