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Stem cells help gecko regenerate "perfect" tail |
Provide a new way for humans to treat hard-to-heal wounds |
Science and Technology Daily, Beijing, November 2 (Reporter Liu Xia) Regenerating body parts is no easy task! Although some lizards can grow back to their severed tails, only an imperfect cartilage tube grows back
.
According to the latest report in "Nature Communications", scientists at the University of Southern California in the United States have used gene-edited stem cells to help the scaly-toed gecko regenerate a more perfect tail
The researchers adjusted the embryonic stem cells and implanted them into the stump of the scaly-toed gecko's tail to make the tail grow more like the original tail than before
.
The newly-grown tail presents the classic "dorsal-ventral pattern", that is, the bone and nerve tissue are on the dorsal side, and the cartilage tissue is on the ventral side
Thomas Lozito, the corresponding author of the research paper and assistant professor of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at the University of Southern California, explained that the natural regenerated tail of a gecko is “just a bunch of concentric tubes composed of fat, muscle, and skin.
” This is because The stem cells of an adult gecko produce a molecular signal that promotes the formation of cartilage in the new tail, but does not promote the formation of bone or nerve tissue
.
To solve this problem, Lozito and colleagues used embryonic stem cells (compared to adult stem cells, embryonic stem cells can develop into a wider range of body tissues), and modified them to ignore the original signal, and then The modified embryonic stem cells were implanted into the tail stump of the gecko whose tail was removed
.
The results showed that the tails grown from these modified stem cells had bone-like grooves in the cartilage, and new nerve tissue was formed on the top of the tail
Lozito said: "The gecko is a member of the Saurianidae family
.
Lizards have lived on the earth for more than 250 million years, but until now they have not been able to grow back and abdomen tails
However, the researchers also pointed out that these modified tails still lack a spinal cord, and there is still a certain gap between the original tail