Procotyla fluviatilisJAMES SIKESTweaking a signaling pathway in flatworms that have partially lost the ability to regrow their heads can reactivate their regeneration abilities, according to a trio of papers published today (July 24) in Nature. The papers, authored by three independent teams, show that manipulation of the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway—known for its role in body patterning in diverse animals—is key to triggering regeneration.
“I think the finding . . . is very important to our understanding of regeneration in particular and of the evolution of this phenomenon in general,” Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, who was not involved in the research, told The Scientist in an email.
The two most extensively studied species of flatworm, Dugesia japonica and Schmidtea mediterranea, are highly regenerative, regrowing heads and tails from stem cells no matter where they are cut. “You can cut them in 200 pieces, then you have 200 worms,” said James Sikes, a coauthor of one of the papers and an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University of San Francisco.
But other flatworms seemed only partially regenerative, able ...
