Dynamic cell transition and immune response landscapes of axolotl limb regeneration revealed by single-cell analysis

The axolotl, Ambystoma mexicanum, has extraordinary capability to fully recover multiple tissues after lost, whereas such capability has disappeared in mammals. Thus, deciphering detailed mechanisms underlying axolotl regeneration could provide valuable lessons for regenerative medicine. However, many questions, such as the origin of essential progenitor cells and key responses of individual types of cells for regeneration remain elusive (Haas and Whited, 2017). Newly developed single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) method enables researchers to observe cellular and molecular dynamics in axolotl regeneration at the single-cell resolution (Gerber et al., 2018; Leigh et al., 2018), but the reported transcriptome landscapes are only for certain cell types or in certain regenerative stages. A complete overview of the regeneration process for all cell types is still lacking.