388C Poster - 04. Stem cells, regeneration and tissue injury
Saturday April 09, 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM

Authors:
Ho Kim ¹; Eric So ¹; Jiae Lee ¹; Yi Wang ²; Vikram Gill ¹; Anna Gorbacheva ¹; Hee Jin Han ¹; Katelyn Ng ¹; Ken Ning ¹; Inez Pranoto ¹; Alejandra Cabrera ¹; Dae Seok Eom ²; Young Kwon ¹

Affiliations:
1) University of Washington; 2) University of California Irvine

Keywords:
n. injury; a. stress responses

The gut visceral musculature plays essential roles in not only moving substances through the lumen but also maintaining the function and physiology of the gut. Although the development of the visceral musculature has been studied in multiple model organisms, how it degenerates is poorly understood. Here, we employ the Drosophila midgut as a model to demonstrate that the visceral musculature is disrupted by intrinsic and extrinsic factors, such as aging, feeding, chemical-induced tissue damage, and oncogenic transformation in the epithelium. Notably, we define four prominent visceral musculature disruption phenotypes, which we refer as ‘sprout’, ‘discontinuity’, ‘furcation’, and ‘crossover’ of the longitudinal muscle. Given that the occurrence of these phenotypes is increased during aging and under various stresses, we propose that these phenotypes can be used as quantitative readouts of deterioration of the visceral musculature. Intriguingly, administration of a tissue-damaging chemical dextran sulfate sodium (DSS) induced similar visceral musculature disruption phenotypes in zebrafish larvae, indicating that ingestion of a tissue-damaging chemical can disrupt the visceral musculature in a vertebrate as well. Our study provides insights into the deterioration of the gut visceral musculature and lays a groundwork for investigating the underlying mechanisms in Drosophila as well as other animals.