School of Medicine Publications and Presentations
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-22-2024
Abstract
Painted turtles are remarkable for their freeze tolerance and supercooling ability along with their associated resilience to hypoxia/anoxia and oxidative stress, rendering them an ideal biomedical model for hypoxia-induced injuries (including strokes), tissue cooling during surgeries, and organ cryopreservation. Yet, such research is hindered by their seasonal reproduction and slow maturation. Here we developed and characterized adult stem cell-derived turtle liver organoids (3D self-assembled in vitro structures) from painted, snapping, and spiny softshell turtles spanning ~175My of evolution, with a subset cryopreserved. This development is, to the best of our knowledge, a first for this vertebrate Order, and complements the only other non-avian reptile organoids from snake venom glands. Preliminary characterization, including morphological, transcriptomic, and proteomic analyses, revealed organoids enriched in cholangiocytes. Deriving organoids from distant turtles and life stages demonstrates that our techniques are broadly applicable to chelonians, permitting the development of functional genomic tools currently lacking in herpetological research. Such platform could potentially support studies including genome-to-phenome mapping, gene function, genome architecture, and adaptive responses to climate change, with implications for ecological, evolutionary, and biomedical research.
Recommended Citation
Zdyrski, C., Gabriel, V., Gessler, T.B. et al. Establishment and characterization of turtle liver organoids provides a potential model to decode their unique adaptations. Commun Biol 7, 218 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-024-05818-1
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
Nature Communications
DOI
10.1038/s42003-024-05818-1
Academic Level
faculty
Mentor/PI Department
Office of Human Genetics
Comments
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.