Frog tadpoles have a remarkable ability to regenerate their tissues—a process that requires a lot of energy, fast. In other animals, rapidly growing tissues, such as tumors and embryos, are thought to get this energy from glycolysis—the products of which can be used to build biomass more easily than other forms of ATP production.
So when Andrea Wills, a biologist at the University of Washington, and her team started looking into what fuels tail regeneration in tadpoles, they expected to find that tadpoles shuttle glucose into this metabolic pathway too, Wills says.
Their first experiment seemed to bear this out. After the team snipped the tails off tadpoles of the western clawed frog (Xenopus tropicalis), they observed increased glucose levels in the regenerating cells. “But then we ran into a problem,” says Wills. The researchers’ RNA-seq experiments didn’t show increased gene expression of any of the enzymes involved in glycolysis, ...
