Vila-Farré Miquel, C Rink Jochen
Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany.
Methods Mol Biol. 2018;1774:173-205. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-7802-1_3.
Planarians are on the rise as a model system for regeneration and stem cell dynamics. Almost in parallel the interest in planarian field biology has declined. Besides representing an independent research discipline in its own right, understanding of the natural habitat is also directly relevant to optimizing culture conditions in the laboratory. Moreover, the current laboratory models are but few of hundreds of planarian species worldwide. Their adaptation to a wide range of ecological niches has resulted in a fascinating diversity of regenerative abilities, body size, reproduction strategies, and life expectancy, to name just a few. With the currently ongoing establishment of large planarian species collections, such phenotypic diversity becomes accessible to comparative mechanistic analysis in the laboratory. Overall, we hope that this chapter inspires an integral view of the planarian model system that not only includes the molecular and cellular processes under investigation but also the evolutionary forces that shaped them in the first place.
涡虫作为再生和干细胞动态研究的模式系统正日益受到关注。与此同时，对涡虫野外生物学的兴趣却在下降。了解自然栖息地不仅本身就是一门独立的研究学科，而且对于优化实验室培养条件也具有直接相关性。此外，目前的实验室模型只是全球数百种涡虫物种中的少数几种。它们对广泛生态位的适应导致了再生能力、体型、繁殖策略和预期寿命等方面令人着迷的多样性，仅举几例。随着目前正在建立的大型涡虫物种库，这种表型多样性在实验室中便于进行比较机制分析。总体而言，我们希望本章能激发对涡虫模式系统的整体认识，不仅包括正在研究的分子和细胞过程，还包括最初塑造它们的进化力量。
