Regeneration

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.

Studying how stem cells move in the body is a critical step to understanding cancer. Researchers have just provided a window into this process by building a machine that beams flatworms with x-rays that kill just enough stem cells to allow the others to move freely around while being tracked.

The Two Headed Worm From Space! It certainly sounds like a good pulpy science fiction story from the 1950s, but in fact, when researchers from Tufts university sent a bunch of flatworms up to the International Space Station, that's exactly what they wound up with.

Some of our closest invertebrate cousins, like this Acorn worm, have the ability to perfectly regenerate any part of their body that's cut off - including the head and nervous system. Humans have most of the same genes, so scientists are trying to work out whether human regeneration is possible too.

​Humans can regrow some tissue after damage, but we can only look on in envy at the humble axolotl. Scientists are studying the genetics of axolotls and other animals in order to learn more about the possibility of giving humans similar limb regeneration capabilities.