Transposon control as a checkpoint during regeneration

The project will test the hypothesis that TE activation is a hallmark of tissue injury that must be suppressed for successful regeneration, and an inability to suppress TEs will stall regeneration. It will specifically examine the role of the Piwi pathway in suppressing TE activity during zebrafish eye regeneration. The approach involves a 2-pronged strategy combining multimodal genomics and manipulative experimentation. First, TE upregulation will be established as a hallmark of tissue injury by profiling TE expression changes across five regenerating tissues using publicly available single-cell transcriptomic data. Second, a multi-omic single-cell dataset will be generated to assess TE expression changes during cone regeneration from injury to functional recovery. Lastly, the project will directly test whether TE repression is required for regeneration by modulating TE activity using Piwi pathway mutants and chemical inhibitors.