Many species of lizards can drop their tails to distract a predator while they make their getaway, an ability known as tail autotomy. The animals then regrow their tails, but a regrown appendage is simply a cartilaginous tube; it lacks all the skeletal and neural structures of the original tail.
Now, researchers from the University of Southern California have discovered a way to allow mourning geckos (Lepidodactylus lugubris) to successfully regrow “perfect” tails, says lead study author Thomas Lozito, a regenerative biologist at the institution’s Keck School of Medicine. He and his colleagues engineered neural stem cells to be unresponsive to the signaling molecule that encourages cartilage production, then injected the cells into lizards whose tails had been amputated. In every case, the animals regrew tails that exhibit normal anatomical patterning, the team reports October 14 in Nature Communications—a first for lizards, they claim.
Lozito tells The Scientist that the ...
