Solving the mysteries of regeneration
Few animals can rival the amazing regeneration abilities of the flatworms known as planarians: When the worms’ tails or heads are cut off, they grow new ones, and even a tiny piece of planarian tissue can regrow an entire animal.Scientists first observed these phenomena more than a century ago, but until the past few years, they knew very little about how planarians achieve these incredible feats. MIT associate professor of biology Peter Reddien has made it his mission to discover the genetic and molecular basis of planarian regeneration, which he describes as one of the great mysteries of biology.“Cellular and molecular insight into regeneration has come far in the past decade, but we’ve still got a long way to go to understand how an animal regrows a missing body part,” says Reddien, who is a core member of MIT’s Whitehead Institute. “That is the obsessive focus of my lab —...