Injuries are no joke. They can be utterly debilitating — in the most literal and extreme terms. And, as such, it can often be a wonder why every animal can’t just regrow itself as much as it needs to. If we all had Wolverine’s healing factor, for instance, we needed worry nearly so much and about the safety of our squishy flesh-prisons. The catch, at least from the evolutionary angle, is that these prodigious healing abilities require a huge amount of energy to sustain and most animals just aren’t designed to handle it. A newly discovered cell from one of biology’s favorite test subjects, namely the flatworm planaria, shows us that even whole-body regeneration from a single cell is possible. Researchers have long known that planaria can create many new worms if they are destroyed or their cells are separated, but the scientists didn’t fully understand how the process worked until now. Stem cells, as you may know, are capable of transforming themselves into any type of cell — though there can often be some other restrictions based on the species they’re taking from. This led researchers to conduct trials to understand which types of stem cells would be able to regrow a whole new worm on its own — and how. That lead Alejandro Alvarado of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City to try some new methods for isolating the right cells from… well, the rest of the worm. One had a bizarre protein on its… [Read full story]
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