PUBLICATION
Countershading in zebrafish results from an Asip1 controlled dorsoventral gradient of pigment cell differentiation
- Authors
- Cal, L., Suarez-Bregua, P., Comesaña, P., Owen, J., Braasch, I., Kelsh, R., Cerdá-Reverter, J.M., Rotllant, J.
- ID
- ZDB-PUB-190308-8
- Date
- 2019
- Source
- Scientific Reports 9: 3449 (Journal)
- Registered Authors
- Braasch, Ingo, Cerdá-Reverter, José Miguel, Kelsh, Robert, Rotllant, Josep
- Keywords
- none
- MeSH Terms
-
- Agouti Signaling Protein/genetics*
- Amino Acid Sequence
- Animals
- Body Patterning/genetics*
- CRISPR-Cas Systems
- Cell Differentiation
- Gene Targeting
- Genetic Loci
- Loss of Function Mutation
- Phenotype
- Pigmentation/genetics*
- Zebrafish/genetics*
- PubMed
- 30837630 Full text @ Sci. Rep.
Citation
Cal, L., Suarez-Bregua, P., Comesaña, P., Owen, J., Braasch, I., Kelsh, R., Cerdá-Reverter, J.M., Rotllant, J. (2019) Countershading in zebrafish results from an Asip1 controlled dorsoventral gradient of pigment cell differentiation. Scientific Reports. 9:3449.
Abstract
Dorso-ventral (DV) countershading is a highly-conserved pigmentary adaptation in vertebrates. In mammals, spatially regulated expression of agouti-signaling protein (ASIP) generates the difference in shading by driving a switch between the production of chemically-distinct melanins in melanocytes in dorsal and ventral regions. In contrast, fish countershading seemed to result from a patterned DV distribution of differently-coloured cell-types (chromatophores). Despite the cellular differences in the basis for counter-shading, previous observations suggested that Agouti signaling likely played a role in this patterning process in fish. To test the hypotheses that Agouti regulated counter-shading in fish, and that this depended upon spatial regulation of the numbers of each chromatophore type, we engineered asip1 homozygous knockout mutant zebrafish. We show that loss-of-function asip1 mutants lose DV countershading, and that this results from changed numbers of multiple pigment cell-types in the skin and on scales. Our findings identify asip1 as key in the establishment of DV countershading in fish, but show that the cellular mechanism for translating a conserved signaling gradient into a conserved pigmentary phenotype has been radically altered in the course of evolution.
Genes / Markers
Expression
Phenotype
Mutations / Transgenics
Human Disease / Model
Sequence Targeting Reagents
Fish
Orthology
Engineered Foreign Genes
Mapping