Caudal Fin Regeneration in Zebrafish - Zebrafish: Methods for Assessing Drug Safety and Toxicity - page 297

Chapter 22

Caudal Fin Regeneration
in Zebrafish

Tamara Tal, Sumitra Sengupta, and Robert L. Tanguay
Department of Environmental and Molecular Toxicology, Environmental Health Sciences
Center, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

22.1 INTRODUCTION

The field of regenerative medicine is aimed at awaking our latent ability to replace
damaged tissues and structures by reactivating evolutionarily conserved signaling
pathways that promote regeneration. Mammals can regenerate a limited number
of structures including skin, digits, skeletal muscle, hair cells, gut epithelium,
liver, pancreas, and blood. In stark comparison, mammalian CNS tissues and
structures (brain, retina, and spinal cord) and heart, limb, and kidney all fail to
regenerate. Therefore, numerous human conditions resulting from injury, aging, and
disease could be significantly improved if therapies that encourage tissue regeneration
were available.
The field of regenerative medicine is aimed at developing strategies to restore
individual cell types, complex tissues, or structures that are lost or damaged. This
emerging field is approached from two distinct angles. In recent years, stemcell-based
models have been developed to generate a suite of differentiated cells for therapeutic
applications. The alternative approach employs the inherent regenerative capacity of
nonmammalian models to define the molecular events that permit tissue regeneration.
While there are several regenerative animal models including salamanders, newts,
hydra, and flatworms that are established to evaluate tissue regeneration, zebrafish
have emerged as a powerful vertebrate regenerative model because of advances in
zebrafish genetics, rapid regeneration time, and the ability to obtain vast quantities of
externally fertilized eggs.