A cross-species analysis of systemic mediators of repair and complex tissue regeneration

Regeneration is an elegant and complex process informed by both local and long-range signals. Many current studies on regeneration are largely limited to investigations of local modulators within a canonical cohort of model organisms. Enhanced genetic tools increasingly enable precise temporal and spatial perturbations within these model regenerators, and these have primarily been applied to cells within the local injury site. Meanwhile, many aspects of broader spatial regulators of regeneration have not yet been examined with the same level of scrutiny. Recent studies have shed important insight into the significant effects of environmental cues and circulating factors on the regenerative process. These observations highlight that consideration of more systemic and possibly more broadly acting cues will also be critical to fully understand complex tissue regeneration. In this review, we explore the ways in which systemic cues and circulating factors affect the initiation of regeneration, the regenerative process, and its outcome. As this is a broad topic, we conceptually divide the factors based on their initial input as either external cues (for example, starvation and light/dark cycle) or internal cues (for example, hormones); however, all of these inputs ultimately lead to internal responses. We consider studies performed in a diverse set of organisms, including vertebrates and invertebrates. Through analysis of systemic mediators of regeneration, we argue that increased investigation of these “systemic factors” could reveal novel insights that may pave the way for a diverse set of therapeutic avenues.