China News Service, February 26 (Zheng Yingying) The internationally renowned academic journal "Science" published on February 26, Beijing time, a research result of Zhou Bin's research group at the Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences. ProTracer, a new technology that can continuously capture cell proliferation for a long time, uses this technology to discover the source of new hepatocytes in the adult liver.

　　Zhou Bin, a researcher at the Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in an interview in Shanghai that the liver has a strong ability to regenerate. After partial liver resection, it can regenerate by relying on its self-proliferation.

　　The basic unit of the liver is the liver lobule. Each liver lobule can be divided into multiple regions. The liver cells in these regions are "not all the same." Scientists have not yet found which region of the liver cells has a strong ability to proliferate. The exact answer.

　　The traditional method of detecting cell proliferation is like a camera. It can only take a moment, that is, to detect the proliferation of cells at a certain point in time. It cannot accurately distinguish the proliferation of various types of cells. This method is inefficient, like a blind person touching an elephant. The part of the thing rather than the whole.

Zhou Bin said that the proliferation rate of liver cells is relatively slow, and the proliferation rate of other types of cells in the liver, such as macrophages and endothelial cells, is relatively fast. Using traditional methods to detect cell proliferation, the liver can be obtained at a certain point in time. Cell proliferation signals are very small or even absent, and even if they do, they are easily overwhelmed by the proliferation information of other cells.

　　Zhou Bin's research group has developed a video recorder that can capture cell proliferation, ProTracer, which can track cell proliferation uninterrupted for a long period of time, and can accurately locate and track the cell proliferation of a specific cell group (such as liver cells).

For example, the effect is like making only the targeted "stars" glow in the dark night, rather than looking for one or two among the stars.

In mouse experiments, they used this technology to label the proliferating hepatocytes with a "unique mark". After close tracking for several weeks to several months, they finally found that the new hepatocytes in the adult liver were mainly derived from the middle area of ​​the liver lobules. Hepatocyte.

　　This research opens up new ideas for liver damage repair and regeneration and provides a new theoretical basis for the treatment of liver diseases.

According to reports, the newly developed ProTracer technology has improved the ability and scope of cell proliferation detection from multiple dimensions, and can be widely used in the detection of cell proliferation in different tissues and organs for many fields such as developmental biology, oncology, neuroscience and regenerative medicine. Research provides technical support.

　　Associate researcher Dr. He Lingjuan (currently working at West Lake University), postdoctoral fellow Pu Wenjuan, and doctoral student Liu Xiuxiu of the Zhou Bin research group of the Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, are the co-first authors of the paper, and researcher Zhou Bin is the corresponding author of the paper. (Finish)