Saima Sidik in Harvard Magazine:
An axolotl is a salamander with a superpower: it can regrow its limbs. When a predator chomps off its leg or it loses an appendage in an accident, a new one will quickly take its place.
Many scientists would like to know how the axolotl does this and whether it’s possible to stimulate lost limbs to regrow in humans, too. In recent decades, research has focused on how cells around an axolotl’s injury site reorganize to kick off limb regeneration. But in fact, the animal’s whole body jumps into action, as regenerative biologist Jessica Whited and her colleagues describe in a study recently published in Cell. The molecular marks of limb amputation were evident in “basically all the places we looked,” Whited says, including in unamputated limbs.
More here.
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