Sometimes you watch a movie, and then you watch it again. And again. And again. Maybe it was Goonies, back when you were a kid (or adult)…or it was a pair of otters holding hands or a baby panda sneezing. Or maaaaybe it was watching stem cells and their progeny divide in real time, within the actual organism. Thanks to the technical gymnastics of a group of stem cell researchers, we can now see how stem cells and their progeny within a hair follicle divide and regenerate hair.
Tissue regeneration begins with stem cells and their immediate progeny. Knowledge of this process has been incomplete due to the difficulty of tracking all of the cell behaviors in living tissue. A group recently used high resolution imaging to track hair regeneration within hair follicles of mice over a long period of time. By tracking cell behaviors, Rompolas and colleagues found that the immediate progeny of stem cells actively divide to regenerate the tissue, while stem cells divide more slowly to contribute to hair regeneration over time. The stem cell progeny cell divisions are mostly aligned with the long axis of the hair. Finally, Rompolas and colleagues used cell ablation to show that a mesenchymal group of cells called the dermal papilla is required for hair regeneration. In the images above, stem cell progeny divisions can be seen in a live hair follicle undergoing growth. Three different cells are colored to show their divisions (right columns).
BONUS! Check out a movie of stem cell progeny divisions here and here, and a movie of stem cell divisions here. For all movies from this paper, click here.
Panteleimon Rompolas, Elizabeth R. Deschene, Giovanni Zito, David G. Gonzalez, Ichiko Saotome, Ann M. Haberman, & Valentina Greco (2012). Live imaging of stem cell and progeny behaviour in physiological hair-follicle regeneration Nature, 487 (7408), 496-499 DOI: 10.1038/nature11218Adapted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd, copyright ©2012
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