Maintenance of Schmidtea mediterranea in the Laboratory

Nídia De Sousa; Teresa Adell

doi:10.21769/BioProtoc.3040

Maintenance of Schmidtea mediterranea in the Laboratory

Bio Protoc. 2018 Oct 5;8(19):e3040. doi: 10.21769/BioProtoc.3040.

Authors

Nídia De Sousa^{1

2}, Teresa Adell^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Statistics and Institute of Biomedicine, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain.
² Institut de Biomedicina de la Universitat de Barcelona (IBUB), Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain.

Abstract

In the last years, planarians have emerged as a unique model animal for studying regeneration and stem cells biology. Although their remarkable regenerative abilities are known for a long time, only recently the molecular tools to understand the biology of planarian stem cells and the fundamentals of their regenerative process have been established. This boost is due to the availability of a sequenced genome and the development of new technologies, such as interference RNA and next-generation sequencing, which facilitate studies of planarian regeneration at the molecular and genetic level. For these reasons, maintain a healthy and stable planarian population in the laboratory is essential to perform reproducible experiments. Here we detail the protocol used in our laboratory to maintain the planarian species Schmidtea mediterranea, the most widespread as a model.

Keywords: Culture; Model organism; Planarian; Planarium; Regeneration; Schmidtea mediterranea.