Peter Reddien: Making heads or tails of it

Credit: © laura barisonzi photography" /> Credit: © laura barisonzi photography For his 33rd birthday last year, Massachusetts Institute of Technology geneticist Peter Reddien received a special gift from his students: a t-shirt imprinted with a picture of a six-headed flatworm. Reddien and his postdoc, Christian Petersen, had recently created the altered planarian, Schmidtea mediterranea,

Written byBob Grant

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For his 33rd birthday last year, Massachusetts Institute of Technology geneticist Peter Reddien received a special gift from his students: a t-shirt imprinted with a picture of a six-headed flatworm. Reddien and his postdoc, Christian Petersen, had recently created the altered planarian, Schmidtea mediterranea, by using RNAi to silence a gene critical to proper regeneration and then amputating parts of the worm's body.1 Where a normal worm would have replaced posterior body parts normally, this one grew only extra heads.

Reddien started studying regeneration as a postdoc at the University of Utah. He and mentor Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, who studies the genetics of planarian regeneration, used RNAi to silence 1,065 genes in S. mediterranea. They recorded about 240 resulting phenotypes - among them sideways movement and the development of extra photoreceptors.2 "No planaria phenotype had been published," Reddien remembers. "That was part of the excitement for me, but also entirely ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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