Grapevine anthracnose is an important disease, responsible for severe yield losses in humid regions around the world. This study aimed to: i: identify the causal agents of grapevine anthracnose in Brazil; ii: characterize Elsinoë ampelina isolates from Brazil and Australia by means of phylogenetic analyses, morphological features and pathogenicity tests; iii: develop an efficient method for conidial production of E. ampelina; iv: develop and validate a standard area diagram set (SADs) for assessing anthracnose severity on grapevine leaves; and v: study the temporal and spatial progression of anthracnose in a Brazilian vineyard. To identify the causal agents of the disease, leaves, stems and berries with anthracnose symptoms were collected from 38 vineyards in southern and southeastern Brazil and 39 E. ampelina and 13 Colletotrichum spp. isolates were obtained. For E. ampelina isolates, the internal transcribed spacer (ITS), histone H3 (HIS3) and elongation factor 1-α (TEF) sequences were analysed. HIS3 was the most informative region with 55 polymorphic sites. Seven Colletotrichum species were identified: C. siamense, C. gloeosporioides, C. fructicola, C. viniferum, C. nymphaeae, C. truncatum and C. cliviae. In pathogenicity tests, only E. ampelina isolates caused anthracnose symptoms on Vitis vinifera \'Moscato Giallo\' and Vitis labrusca \'Niagara Rosada\'. To characterize E. ampelina from Brazil and Australia, 35 isolates were analysed. ITS and TEF sequences of all isolates were monomorphic. The haplotype network generated from HIS3 dataset showed four distinct haplotypes. High genetic variability was observed in two Brazilian isolates, haplotype EA4, which may have lost the intron region during species evolution. Colonies showed variable coloration, wrinkled texture, absence of spores and slow growth. Brazilian isolates produced conidia larger than conidia from Australian isolates. To induce the conidial production, mycelial fragments were shake-incubated in rainwater and distilled water for 7 days. Isolates produced different concentrations of conidia and the conidial germination was more than 88.5%. In infectivity tests, conidia caused typical anthracnose symptoms on leaves. The SADs developed comprises six true colour diagrams with severity ranging from 1.1 to 27.4%. The use of the SADs improved the accuracy, precision, agreement and inter-rater reliability of the estimates conducted by 12 raters. The temporal and spatial dynamics of anthracnose was carried out in a \'Niagara Rosada\' vineyard in 2014 and 2015. The incidence of vines with diseased leaves, stems and berries and the severity disease on leaves were recorded. Anthracnose symptoms occurred rapidly after bud break and ontogenic resistance was observed for all organs assessed. The monomolecular model showed the best fit to the incidence progress. Temporal analyses suggest that the progress of anthracnose incidence and severity over time is governed mainly by the primary inoculum due to age-related resistance of the vine organs. Spatial analyses showed a predominantly random spatial pattern of diseased vines. In conclusion, this thesis presents a more in-depth understanding of the aetiology and epidemiology of an important grapevine disease. / Antracnose da videira é uma importante doença, responsável por severas perdas de produtividade em regiões húmidas em diversos locais do planeta. Este estudo objetivou: i: identificar o agente causal da antracnose da videira no Brasil; ii: caracterizar isolados de Elsinoë ampelina do Brasil e Austrália através de análises filogenéticas, morfologia e testes de patogenicidade; iii: desenvolver um método eficiente para produção de conídios de E. ampelina; iv: desenvolver e validar uma escala diagramática para avaliar a severidade de antracnose em folhas; e v: estudar o progresso temporal e espacial da antracnose em um vinhedo brasileiro. Para identificar os agentes causais da doença, folhas, ramos e bagas com sintomas de antracnose foram coletados em 38 vinhedos das regiões sul e sudeste do Brasil e 39 isolados de E. ampelina e 13 isolados de Colletotrichum spp. foram obtidos. Para isolados de E. ampelina, sequências de espaçador interno transcrito (ITS), histona H3 (HIS3) e fator de elongação 1-α (TEF) foram analisadas. HIS3 foi a região mais informativa com 55 sítios polimórficos. Foram identificadas sete espécies de Colletotrichum: C. siamense, C. gloeosporioides, C. fructicola, C. viniferum, C. nymphaeae, C. truncatum e C. cliviae. Nos testes de patogenicidade, somente isolados de E. ampelina causaram sintomas de antracnose em Vitis vinifera \'Moscato Giallo\' e Vitis labrusca \'Niagara Rosada\'. Para a caracterização de E. ampelina do Brasil e Austrália, 35 isolados foram analisados. Sequências de ITS e TEF de todos os isolados foram monomórficas. A rede de haplótipos gerada a partir de sequências de HIS3 resultou na formação de quatro haplótipos. Alta diversidade genética foi observada em dois isolados brasileiros, haplótipo EA4, sugerindo a perda do intron durante a evolução da espécie. Colônias apresentaram coloração variável, textura enrugada, ausência de esporos e lento crescimento. Isolados brasileiros apresentaram conídios maiores que conídios de isolados australianos. Para induzir a esporulação, fragmentos de micélio foram agitados e incubados em água da chuva e água destilada durante 7 dias. Isolados produziram diferentes concentrações de conídios e a germinação foi superior a 88,5%. Nos testes de infectividade, os conídios causaram sintomas de antracnose em folhas. A escala diagramática desenvolvida compreende seis diagramas em cores reais com severidade variando de 1,1 a 27,4%. O uso da escala diagramática melhorou a acurácia, precisão, concordância e reprodutibilidade das estimativas conduzidas por 12 avaliadores. A dinâmica temporal e espacial da antracnose foi conduzida em vinhedo de \'Niagara Rosada\' em 2014 e 2015. A incidência de videiras com folhas, ramos e bagas sintomáticos e a severidade em folhas foram registradas. Os sintomas de antracnose ocorreram rapidamente após a brotação sendo observada resistência ontogênica em todos os órgãos avaliados. O modelo monomolecular mostrou o melhor ajuste para o progresso da incidência. As análises temporais sugerem que o progresso da incidência e severidade durante o tempo é influenciado principalmente pelo inóculo inicial devido à resistência ontogênica dos órgãos. As análises espaciais mostraram um padrão espacial predominantemente aleatório de videiras sintomáticas. Em conclusão, esta tese apresenta uma compreensão mais aprofundada da etiologia e epidemiologia de uma importante doença da videira.

Repositórios com volumes de dados cada vez maiores foram viabilizados pelo desenvolvimento tecnológico, criando importantes fontes de informação em diversas áreas da atividade humana. Esses repositórios freqüentemente incluem informação sobre o comportamento temporal e o posicionamento espacial dos itens neles representados, os quais são extremamente relevantes para a análise dos dados. O processo de descoberta de conhecimento a partir de grandes volumes de dados tem sido objeto de estudo em diversas disciplinas, dentre elas a Visualização de Informação, cujas técnicas podem apoiar diversas etapas desse processo. Esta tese versa sobre o uso da Visualização Exploratória em conjuntos de dados com atributos temporais e espaciais, empregando a estratégia de múltiplas visualizações coordenadas para apoiar o tratamento de dados em estágios iniciais de processos de descoberta de conhecimento. São propostas duas novas representações visuais temporais – denominadas ‘Variação Temporal Uni-escala’ e ‘Variação Temporal Multi-escala’ – para apoiar a análise exploratória de dados temporais. Adicionalmente, é proposto um modelo de arquitetura de software – AdaptaVis, que permite a integração dessas e outras representações visuais em uma plataforma de visualização de informação flexível, extensível e adaptável às necessidades de diferentes usuários, tarefas e domínios de aplicação – a plataforma InfoVis. Sessões de uso realizadas com dados e usuários reais dos domínios de Climatologia e Negócios permitiram validar empiricamente as representações visuais e o modelo. O modelo AdaptaVis e a plataforma InfoVis estabelecem bases para a continuidade de diversas pesquisas em Visualização de Informação, particularmente o estudo de aspectos relacionados ao uso coordenado de múltiplas visualizações, à modelagem do processo de coordenação, e à integração entre múltiplas técnicas visuais e analíticas. / Data repositories with ever increasing volumes have been made possible by the evolution in data collection technologies, creating important sources of information in several fields of human activity. Such data repositories often include information about both the temporal behavior and the spatial positioning of data items that will be relevant in future data analysis tasks. The process of discovering knowledge embedded in great volumes of data is a topic of study in several disciplines, including Information Visualization, which offers a range of techniques to support different stages of a discovery process. This thesis addresses the application of Exploratory Visualization techniques on datasets with temporal and spatial attributes, using the strategy of coordinating multiple data views, to assist data treatment on early stages of knowledge discovery processes. Two temporal visual representations are proposed – ‘Uni-scale Temporal Behavior’ and ‘Multi-scale Temporal Behavior’ – that support the exploratory analysis of temporal data. Moreover, a software architecture model is introduced – AdaptaVis, that allows the integration of these and other visualization techniques into a flexible, extensible and adaptable information visualization platform – called InfoVis – that may be tailored to meet the requirements of different users, tasks and application domains. Sessions conducted with real data and users from the Climatology and Business application domains allowed an empirical validation of both the visual representations and the model. The AdaptaVis model and the InfoVis platform establish the basis for further research on issues related to the coordinated use of multiple data views, the modeling of the coordination process and the integration amongst multiple visual and analytical techniques.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(農学) / 甲第19032号 / 農博第2110号 / 新制||農||1031(附属図書館) / 学位論文||H27||N4914(農学部図書室) / 31983 / 京都大学大学院農学研究科地域環境科学専攻 / (主査)教授 谷 誠, 教授 北山 兼弘, 教授 本田 与一 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Agricultural Science / Kyoto University / DGAM

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<p>In traffic scene perception for autonomous vehicles, driving videos are available from in-car sensors such as camera and LiDAR for road detection and collision avoidance. There are some existing challenges in computer vision tasks for video processing, including object detection and tracking, semantic segmentation, etc. First, due to that consecutive video frames have a large data redundancy, traditional spatial-to-temporal approach inherently demands huge computational resource. Second, in many real-time scenarios, targets move continuously in the view as data streamed in. To achieve prompt response with minimum latency, an online model to process the streaming data in shift-mode is necessary. Third, in addition to shape-based recognition in spatial space, motion detection also replies on the inherent temporal continuity in videos. While current works either lack long-term memory for reference or consume a huge amount of computation. </p> <p><br></p> <p>The purpose of this work is to achieve strongly temporal-associated sensing results in real-time with minimum memory, which is continually embedded to a pragmatic framework for speed and path planning. It takes a temporal-to-spatial approach to cope with fast moving vehicles in autonomous navigation. It utilizes compact road profiles (RP) and motion profiles (MP) to identify path regions and dynamic objects, which drastically reduces video data to a lower dimension and increases sensing rate. Specifically, we sample one-pixel line at each video frame, the temporal congregation of lines from consecutive frames forms a road profile image; while motion profile consists of the average lines by sampling one-belt pixels at each frame. By applying the dense temporal resolution to compensate the sparse spatial resolution, this method reduces 3D streaming data into 2D image layout. Based on RP and MP under various weather conditions, there have three main tasks being conducted to contribute the knowledge domain in perception and planning for autonomous driving. </p> <p><br></p> <p>The first application is semantic segmentation of temporal-to-spatial streaming scenes, including recognition of road and roadside, driving events, objects in static or motion. Since the main vision sensing tasks for autonomous driving are identifying road area to follow and locating traffic to avoid collision, this work tackles this problem by using semantic segmentation upon road and motion profiles. Though one-pixel line may not contain sufficient spatial information of road and objects, the consecutive collection of lines as a temporal-spatial image provides intrinsic spatial layout because of the continuous observation and smooth vehicle motion. Moreover, by capturing the trajectory of pedestrians upon their moving legs in motion profile, we can robustly distinguish pedestrian in motion against smooth background. The experimental results of streaming data collected from various sensors including camera and LiDAR demonstrate that, in the reduced temporal-to-spatial space, an effective recognition of driving scene can be learned through Semantic Segmentation.</p> <p><br></p> <p>The second contribution of this work is that it accommodates standard semantic segmentation to sequential semantic segmentation network (SE3), which is implemented as a new benchmark for image and video segmentation. As most state-of-the-art methods are greedy for accuracy by designing complex structures at expense of memory use, which makes trained models heavily depend on GPUs and thus not applicable to real-time inference. Without accuracy loss, this work enables image segmentation at the minimum memory. Specifically, instead of predicting for image patch, SE3 generates output along with line scanning. By pinpointing the memory associated with the input line at each neural layer in the network, it preserves the same receptive field as patch size but saved the computation in the overlapped regions during network shifting. Generally, SE3 applies to most of the current backbone models in image segmentation, and furthers the inference by fusing temporal information without increasing computation complexity for video semantic segmentation. Thus, it achieves 3D association over long-range while under the computation of 2D setting. This will facilitate inference of semantic segmentation on light-weighted devices.</p> <p><br></p> <p>The third application is speed and path planning based on the sensing results from naturalistic driving videos. To avoid collision in a close range and navigate a vehicle in middle and far ranges, several RP/MPs are scanned continuously from different depths for vehicle path planning. The semantic segmentation of RP/MP is further extended to multi-depths for path and speed planning according to the sensed headway and lane position. We conduct experiments on profiles of different sensing depths and build up a smoothly planning framework according to their them. We also build an initial dataset of road and motion profiles with semantic labels from long HD driving videos. The dataset is published as additional contribution to the future work in computer vision and autonomous driving. </p>

Sur la base de constats globaux concernant l’importance d’appliquer des modes de gestion durable des zones forestières et le manque d’investigation concernant l’histoire passée des feux en Europe centrale, il a été entrepris de reconstruire l’histoire des événements de feux et de la dynamique forestière pour des sites d’étude en Allemagne. L’ensemble des données obtenues et analysées ont été utilisées pour l’évaluation du niveau de naturalité des sites étudiés, cette notion étant essentielle pour la mise en place d’une gestion durable, et/ou pour des projets de conservation et / ou de restauration des systèmes perturbés. Concernant les dynamiques des écosystèmes en Europe centrale, il a été souvent mis en évidence que l’homme joue un rôle essentiel depuis des millénaires. Par conséquent, l’approche historique des événements de feux et de la dynamique forestière à été réalisée sur de longues échelles temporelles. Neuf sites d’étude ont été sélectionnés incluant une large gamme de systèmes forestiers d’Europe centrale. Les sites d’études sont répartis dans deux zones générales d’étude : le nord de l’Allemagne (Schleswig-Holstein), qui comprend quatre sites d’étude, et le centre de l’Allemagne (le Harz), qui comprend cinq sites d’étude. Quatre disciplines ont été principalement utilisées. Pour définir l’état actuel des sites d’études ceux-ci ont été caractérisés, utilisant divers indicateurs dendrométriques concernant la structure et la composition des parcelles analysées. Pour obtenir des informations à propos de la dynamique forestière des peuplements forestiers en place des analyses dendroécologiques ont été utilisées. Pour analyser la dynamique forestière sur une longue échelle temporelle, à une échelle spatiale comparable, des analyses pédoanthracologiques ont été menées, combinées à des analyses de sols. De plus, des analyses anthracologiques de séquences de tourbes ont été réalisées, fournissant, combinées avec les données pedoanthracologiques, des enseignements à propos de l’histoire des incendies. L’état actuel et la dynamique forestière récente des sites étudiés indiquent divers niveaux de complexité des peuplements forestiers, correspondant souvent à divers niveaux postulés d’impact anthropique. Il a été obtenu huit chronologies moyennes, standardisées en haute et moyenne fréquences, âgées au maximum de 1744 et au minimum de 1923 ans. A partir de ces chronologies des changements dans les conditions de croissance de peuplements forestiers ont été mises en évidence. Basées sur un ensemble de 71 charbons de bois datés par radiocarbone, il a été mis en évidence, à l’échelle locale et globale, deux principales phases présentant plus d’événements de feux datés, une durant le Pléistocène supérieur/Holocène inférieur, une autre durant l’Holocène supérieur. Pour les deux phases identifiées des forçages climatique et anthropogénique ont été respectivement postulés comme déterminisme des occurrences de feux. Finalement, les différentes données collectées ont été utilisées de façon combinée pour reconstruire l’histoire des feux et des forêts des sites étudiés, afin de contribuer à l’évaluation de leur niveau de naturalité. / Considering two global observations in Central Europe of, firstly, the need for, and development of, sustainable and biological conservation practices for forest and/or woodland areas and, secondly, the lack of long-term fire history, an attempt has been made to reconstruct the fire and the forest history at several investigation sites in Germany. The overall data set gathered and analyzed has been used for on-site naturalness assessment. This latter notion is crucial for forest system conservation/restoration planning, considering the past human impact on forest dynamics. Also, in view of this past human impact on forest systems, which is well-documented for Central Europe, as occurring on a multi-millennium scale, an historical perspective perceptive that combined a long and short temporal scale of investigation was used.Nine investigation sites were selected, in order to include various and representative types of Central European forest. Therefore, the investigation sites were located in two main investigation areas. One is in Northern Germany (Schleswig-Holstein) and includes four investigation sites. The other is in Central Germany (Harz Mountains) and includes five investigation sites. Four main approaches were used. To assess the current state of the investigated site, forest stand characterization was undertaken (i.e. based on various forest attributes that concern stand structure and composition). Tree ring series were analyzed to provide insights about short-term forest tree population dynamics. Then, charcoal records from soil (combined with soil analysis) and peat sequences were qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed. These last two approaches also provide information about the past fire history. Forest current and short-term dynamics illustrated various levels of stand complexity, often corresponding to various levels of human impact that had been postulated. Eight mean site tree-ring chronologies, standardized in high and mid-frequency signal, spanning at a maximum of up to AD 1744 and at a minimum of up to AD 1923, were obtained. The insight, about the identification of events of growing changes and the correlated temporal and, if possible, spatial patterns, was discussed. Charcoal analysis provided a long-term insight about fire history. Based on 71 charcoal radiocarbon dates, it was shown on a macro-scale that there were two phases that had a greater frequency of fire - one during the transition from the late Pleistocene to the early Holocene, and one during the mid- and late Holocene. A strong human control during the most recent fire phase has been postulated. This is supported by on-site soil and peat charcoal record analysis, allowing one to point out the event of environmental changes (disturbances), at local scales. In the end, the on-site data from the various indicators were combined to assess the fire and forest history and the naturalness level of the investigated sites, based on past insights, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the present and helping to anticipate the future.

This hydrogeophysical field experiment evaluated the ability of high frequency (450 & 900 MHz) ground penetrating radar (GPR) to characterize the release of gasoline over an annual cycle of in situ conditions. In August 2008, 200 liters of E10 gasoline were released into the unconfined sand aquifer at CFB Borden. The 900 MHz profiling clearly shows the development of shallow (i.e., above 10 ns) high reflectivity in the vicinity of the trench immediately after the release. Additional lateral extension of high reflectivity zone was observed over the following 20 days until the seasonal water table low stand occurred, after which no further lateral movement was observed. Throughout the remainder of the monitoring, the 900 MHz profiling observed a long-term dimming of reflectivity at the periphery of the impacted zone. While direct imaging of the shallow impacted zone by the 450 MHz antennas was significantly obscured by the superposition with the direct air-ground wave arrival; its improved depth of penetration allowed the measurement of a velocity “pull-up” of an underlying stratigraphic interface resulting from the displacement of low velocity water by high velocity gasoline. The maximum pull-up was observed during the water table low stand. The ongoing changes in the pull-up magnitude during the remainder of the observation period suggest the continued redistribution of fluids in the impacted zone. Because of the shallow depth of the gasoline impacted zone, the effects of freezing during the winter period were observed in the GPR imaging. The presence of the gasoline impacted zone appears to have affected the depth of freezing, causing a depression of the frozen soil base. The dimming of the direct air-ground wave complex indicates that the contaminant phase brought to the surface by the water table fluctuations have impacted the nature of the near-surface freezing.

Community Climate Model 3 (CCM3) is run on an idealized all land zonally symmetric planet (Terra Blanda) with no seasonality, no snow and fixed soil moisture to obtain a stationary time series effectively much longer than conventional runs with geography and seasons. The surface temperature field generated is studied to analyze the spatial and temporal spectra, estimate the length scale and time scale of the model, and test the linearity of response to periodic and steady heat source forcings. The length scale of the model is found to be in the range of 1000-2000 km and the time scale is estimated to be 24 days for the global average surface temperature field. The response of the global average temperature is found to be fairly linear to periodic and the steady heat source forcings. The results obtained are compared with the results of a similar study that used CCM0. Fluctuation Dissipation theorem is also tested for applicability on CCM3. The response of the surface temperature field to a step function forcing is demonstrated to be very similar to the decay of naturally occurring anomalies, and the auto-correlation function. Return period of surface temperature anomalies is also studied. It is observed that the length of the data obtained from CCM3, though sufficient for analysis of first and second moments, is significantly deficient for return period analysis. An AR1 process is simulated to model the global averaged surface temperature of Terra Blanda 3 to assess the sampling error associated with short runs.

This hydrogeophysical field experiment evaluated the ability of high frequency (450 & 900 MHz) ground penetrating radar (GPR) to characterize the release of gasoline over an annual cycle of in situ conditions. In August 2008, 200 liters of E10 gasoline were released into the unconfined sand aquifer at CFB Borden. The 900 MHz profiling clearly shows the development of shallow (i.e., above 10 ns) high reflectivity in the vicinity of the trench immediately after the release. Additional lateral extension of high reflectivity zone was observed over the following 20 days until the seasonal water table low stand occurred, after which no further lateral movement was observed. Throughout the remainder of the monitoring, the 900 MHz profiling observed a long-term dimming of reflectivity at the periphery of the impacted zone. While direct imaging of the shallow impacted zone by the 450 MHz antennas was significantly obscured by the superposition with the direct air-ground wave arrival; its improved depth of penetration allowed the measurement of a velocity “pull-up” of an underlying stratigraphic interface resulting from the displacement of low velocity water by high velocity gasoline. The maximum pull-up was observed during the water table low stand. The ongoing changes in the pull-up magnitude during the remainder of the observation period suggest the continued redistribution of fluids in the impacted zone. Because of the shallow depth of the gasoline impacted zone, the effects of freezing during the winter period were observed in the GPR imaging. The presence of the gasoline impacted zone appears to have affected the depth of freezing, causing a depression of the frozen soil base. The dimming of the direct air-ground wave complex indicates that the contaminant phase brought to the surface by the water table fluctuations have impacted the nature of the near-surface freezing.

Axolotl uniquely generates blastema cells as a pool of progenitor/stem cells to restore an entire limb, a particular property that other organisms, such as humans, do not have. What underlies these differences? Is the main difference that cells residing at the amputation plane (in the stump) undergo reprogramming processes to re-enter the embryonic program, which allows developmental patterning to start, or are there fundamental differences? There is also a significant debate about whether regeneration occurs via stem cell differentiation or by dedifferentiation of mature limb tissue. The aim of my thesis was to address following questions: Are the cells in the blastema reprogrammed or differentiated to regenerate? Are the blastema cells genetically reactivated de novo during regeneration? How does the amputated limb exactly know which part of the limb needs to be regenerate? Using a novel technique of long-term genetic fate mapping, my team demonstrated that dedifferentiation in regenerated axolotl muscle tissue does not occur. Instead, PAX7+ satellite cells indeed play an important role during muscle regeneration in the axolotl limb. Surprisingly, this is in contrast to the newt, which regenerates muscle cells through a dedifferentiation process. Therefore, there is a fundamental difference that underlies the regenerative mechanism ((Sandoval-Guzman et al., 2014) [KR1]). This demonstrates that there is an unexpected diversity and flexibility of cellular mechanims used during limb regeneration, even among two closely related species. Finally, if one salamander species uses a mammalian regenerative strategy (Cornelison and Wold, 1997; Collins et al., 2005) involving stem cells and another uses a dedifferentiative strategy, this raises the question of whether there are other fundamental aspects of regeneration that could also be anomalous. This hypothesis is promising since there could be more than one possible mechanism to induce mammalian regeneration. The process of limb regeneration in principle seems to be more similar to those of limb development as historically assumed. We showed molecularly that embryonic players are reused during regeneration by reactivating the position- and tissue-specific developmental gene programs by using the newly isolated Twist sequences as early blastema cell markers ((Kragl et al., 2013) [KR2]). To gain insights into the molecular mechanisms of the P/D limb patterning in general, it was crucial to study the early patterning events of the resident progenitor/stem cells by using the specific blastema cell marker HoxA as a positional marker along the proximo-distal axis. Our HOXA protein analysis using high molecular and cellular resolution as well as transplantation assays demonstrated for the first time that axolotl limb blastema cells acquire their positional identity in a proximal to distal sequence. We found a hierarchy of cellular restrictions in positional identities. Amputation at the level of the upper arm showed that the blastema harbors cells, which convert to lower arm and hand. We observed ((Roensch et al., 2013) [KR3]) for the first time that intercalation- the intermediate element (lower arm) arises later from an interaction between the proximal and distal cells identities- does not occur. Intercalation, which has been an accepted model for a long time, is not the patterning mechanism underlying normal (without any manipulation) limb regeneration that is unique to axolotl. We further demonstrated, using the Hox genes as markers that positional identity is cell-type specific since their effects were confirmed to be present in the lateral plate mesoderm- derived cells of the limb. As our knowledge about limb blastemas expands concerning cell composition and molecular events controlling patterning, the similarity to development is becoming more and more clear. My work has resolved many ambiguities surrounding the molecularly identification of different types of blastema cells and how P/D limb patterning occurs during regeneration in comparison to development. It has highlighted the importance of combining high-resolution methods, such as in situ hybridizations, single-cell PCR (sc-PCR) of individual dissociated blastema cells and genetic labeling methods with grafting experiments to map cell fates in vivo. In addition to understanding the processes of regeneration, another long-term goal in the regenerative medicine field is to identify key molecules that trigger the regeneration of tissues. Recently, my colleague Takuji Sugiura (Sugiura et al., 2016) observed that an early event of blastema formation is the secretion of molecules like MLP (MARCKS-like protein), which induces wound-associated cell cycle re-entry. Such findings further increase the enthusiasm of biologists to understand the underlying principles of regeneration. By building our knowledge of the molecules and pathways that are involved in tissue regeneration, we increase the possibility of identifying a way to ‘activate’ regenerative processes in humans and thus reach the final goal of regenerative medicine, which is to use the concepts of cellular reprogramming, stem cell biology and tissue engineering to repair complex body structures.