Abstract
Xenopus is an attractive model system for regeneration studies, as it exhibits an extraordinary regenerative capacity compared to mammals. It is commonly used to study body part regeneration following amputation, for instance of the limb, the tail, or the retina. Models with more subtle injuries are also needed for human degenerative disease modeling, allowing for the study of stem cell recruitment for the regeneration of a given cellular subtype. We present here a model to ablate photoreceptor cells in the Xenopus retina. This method is based on the nitroreductase/metronidazole (NTR/MTZ) system, a combination of chemical and genetic tools, allowing for the conditional ablation of targeted cells. This type of approach establishes Xenopus as a powerful model to study cellular regeneration and stem cell regulation.
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Acknowledgments
We thank B.E. Knox for providing the Rhodopsin promoter plasmid. Our lab is supported by grants from the Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (FRM), Association Retina France and Fondation Valentin Haüy.
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Chesneau, A., Bronchain, O., Perron, M. (2018). Conditional Chemogenetic Ablation of Photoreceptor Cells in Xenopus Retina. In: Vleminckx, K. (eds) Xenopus. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1865. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-8784-9_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-8784-9_10
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