Faculty Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Version
Published Version
Journal/Book/Conference Title
Communications Biology
Volume
7
Issue
1
First Page
1
Last Page
19
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.
Department
Department of Biology
Original Publication Date
2-22-2024
Object Description
1 PDF File
DOI of published version
10.1038/s42003-024-05818-1
Repository
UNI ScholarWorks, Rod Library, University of Northern Iowa
Copyright
©2024 The Authors. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Zdyrski, Christopher; Gabriel, Vojtech; Gessler, Thea B.; Ralston, Abigail; Sifuentes-Romero, Itzel; Kundu, Debosmita; Honold, Sydney; Wickham, Hannah; Topping, Nicholas E.; Sahoo, Dipak Kumar; Bista, Basanta; Tamplin, Jeffrey; Ospina, Oscar; Piñeyro, Pablo; Arriaga, Marco; Galan, Jacob A.; Meyerholz, David K.; Allenspach, Karin; Mochel, Jonathan P.; and Valenzuela, Nicole, "Establishment and characterization of turtle liver organoids provides a potential model to decode their unique adaptations" (2024). Faculty Publications. 5629.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/facpub/5629
Comments
First published in Communications Biology, v7 (Feb 2024) published by Springer Nature Limited. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-024-05818-1