Digital Gene Expression profiling of Schmidtea mediterranea stem cells.

The freshwater planarian Schmidtea mediterranea is well known by its amazing regeneration capabilities thanks to the presence of adult stem cells, the neoblasts, the only proliferative cells and responsible for the differentiation in all the cell types of the organism. This study involves the creation of separated transcript libraries from both, isolated neoblasts and differentiated cells, as well as their posterior sequencing and quantification through Digital Gene Expression (DGE) for the characterization of the neoblast transcriptome. Overall design: Three DGE libraries were produced from FACS isolated cell populations X1 (proliferating stem cells, S/G2/M), X2 (a mix of proliferating stem cells and stem cell progeny, G0/G1) and Xin (differentiated cells, G0/G1). Cells were isolated from a pool of 32 regenerating animals two days after being cut off pre- and post-pharingeally to trigger regeneration and neoblast proliferation.