The type of salamander called axolotl, with its frilly gills and widely
spaced eyes, looks like an alien and has other-worldly powers of regeneration.
Lose a limb, part of the heart or even a large portion of its brain? No problem:
They grow back.
“It regenerates
almost anything after almost any injury that doesn’t kill it,” said Parker
Flowers, postdoctoral associate in the lab of Craig Crews, the John C. Malone
Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and professor of
chemistry and pharmacology.
If scientists
can find the genetic basis for the axolotl’s ability to regenerate, they might
be able to find ways to restore damaged tissue in humans. But they have been
thwarted in the attempt by another peculiarity of the axolotl — it has the
largest genome of any animal yet sequenced, 10 times larger than that of
humans.
Now Flowers and colleagues have found an ingenious way to circumvent the
animal’s complex genome to identify at least two genes involved in regeneration,
they report Jan. 28 in the journal eLife.
The advent of
new sequencing technologies and gene-editing technology has allowed researchers
to craft a list of hundreds of gene candidates that could responsible for
regeneration of limbs. However, the huge size of the axolotl genome populated
by vast areas of repeated stretches of DNA has made it difficult to investigate
the function of those genes.
Lucas Sanor, a
former graduate student in the lab, and fellow co-first author Flowers used
gene editing techniques in a multi-step process to essentially create markers
that could track 25 genes suspected of being involved in limb regeneration. The
method allowed them to identify two genes in the blastema — a mass of dividing
cells that form at the site of a severed limb — that were also responsible for
partial regeneration of the axolotl tail.
Flowers stressed
that many more such genes probably exist. Since humans possess similar genes,
the researchers say, scientists may one day discover how to activate them to
help speed wound repair or regenerate tissue.
Source: https://news.yale.edu/2020/01/28/tiny-salamanders-huge-genome-may-harbor-secrets-regeneration
Journal article: https://elifesciences.org/articles/48511
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