Regeneration

Tendon injuries are painful and don’t always heal properly. Researchers at the Terasaki Institute have now shown that silk scaffolds loaded with stem cells can help tendons regenerate more effectively.

Animals like axolotls can regrow fully functional replacements for lost limbs. In a breakthrough new study, scientists have demonstrated how one dose of a drug cocktail can regrow lost limbs in frogs that don’t normally have regenerative abilities.

After an injury, nerves struggle to regrow completely, leaving patients with reduced mobility and sensation. In tests on rats, researchers have now demonstrated a way to improve nerve repair using proteins from the support network around cells.

Lizards can regrow their tails, but the new tail isn't quite perfect. Scientists have now used stem cell therapy to let lizards grow better tails – bones, nerves and all – in an advance that could have implications for better wound healing in humans.

Researchers at Salk Institute have uncovered a mechanism by which stem cells can help regenerate muscles. The discovery could provide a new drug target for repairing muscles after injury or rebuilding muscle mass lost during the normal aging process.

Unfortunately there isn’t much that doctors can do to repair the damage after a spinal cord injury. But UCLA researchers have shown in tests in mice that injections of a porous scaffold material can help the body patch up the damage.

It’s normally a leg here or a tail there, but scientists have now discovered one of the most extreme examples of limb regeneration ever seen in an animal – sea slugs that voluntarily detach their own heads and then regrow an entire body from it.

Osteoarthritis is a painful and fairly common condition that’s hard to slow, so treatment options are mostly limited to reducing pain. But a new study in mice has now found that nanotherapeutic injections into the knee can slow cartilage degradation.

Newts do it. Lizards do it. Even educated axolotls do it. Regenerating limbs isn’t something many animals can do, but now there’s a surprising new addition to the list – alligators. A study has shown that alligators can regrow part of a lost tail.

Axons, the long nerve fibers that pass signals between neurons, can't regenerate after injury. But now researchers have found that boosting a certain protein helps patch up axons, returning more movement and feeling to mice with spinal cord injuries.

Our bodies aren't great at regeneration. Other creatures have mastered this skill though, and now scientists at the University of California Davis (UC Davis) and Harvard have sequenced the RNA transcripts for the immortal hydra and figured out how it manages to do just that.

Researchers have identified at least four species of marine worms that have independently evolved the ability to regrow their heads and brains, despite sharing a common ancestor that couldn’t. The discovery could help scientists understand the traits that allow animals to regrow lost limbs.