Scientists Demonstrate Mammalian Regeneration Through a Single Gene Deletion

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100315161913.htm

by dpurp • 16 years ago

117 25 16 years ago

Zak• 16 years ago

I think an important question to research here is why p21 evolved in mammals. The article says knocking it out doesn't appear to increase cancer rates, which would have been my first and only guess.

lotusleaf1987• 16 years ago

Maybe somehow it speeds up the system of evolution by keeping life expectancies shorter, thereby increasing turnover (death and new births)? I have no clue just throwing that out there.

srean• 16 years ago

To survive natural selection the gene must give the animal some reproductive advantage. I can understand that promoting longevity beyond the reproductive stage of one's life cycle affords no such benefit. But one still has to account for the fact that the lack of the gene appears to increase the survivability in the reproductive pahse as well. Something more must be going on.

DavidSJ• 16 years ago

Individual organisms don't work for "the system of evolution"'s benefit. They work for themselves.

chc• 16 years ago

My guess would be that regeneration is too big a drain on the metabolism. Compared to the animals with that ability, mammals have positively ridiculous energy needs already. It may be that better healing from wounds is not sufficiently useful to make up for the strain that the healing itself entails.

arethuza• 16 years ago

So weight reduction (or the ability to eat more food and stay the same weight) and regeneration - now that does sound good!

bpd1069• 16 years ago

That's a simple one, chicks dig scars...

mickdarling• 16 years ago

I seem to remember reading a while ago that the immune system in animals with regenerative ability needs to be stronger because the blastoma wound is "open" longer and more prone to infection. For humans today we can mitigate infection pretty well relative to a pretty much any mammal in the wild.

schwit• 16 years ago

This story is from Mar. 16, 2010

tocomment• 16 years ago

I wonder what's happened since then? You'd think we'd really jump on this kind of science. I wonder why all this stuff is so slow.

eru• 16 years ago

Science takes as long as writing computer programs.

modeless• 16 years ago

They don't mention regenerating anything specific besides holes in ears. Can these mice regenerate digits? Whole limbs? Internal organs? Spinal column damage?

pygy_2• 16 years ago

Google? If you follow the link at the bottom of the article will lead you to the PNAS paper. You'll learn that the mice strain is called MRL[1].

It can regenerate its ears, cartillage[2], cardiac muscle after cold-induced lesions[3] but sadly not after infarction/reperfusion[4] and digits (to some extent, in neonate mice)[5]. There may be more.

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/107/13/5845.full

[2]http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-08/wi-rit080201....

[3] http://www.pnas.org/content/98/17/9830.full

[4] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1067-1927.2005....

[5] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1524-475X.2007....

6ren• 16 years ago

I expect the full effects are not very dramatic, else it would have been noticed earlier, since MRL are commonly used in experiments.

I find it reassuring that this unknown thing was right on our doorstep, and it makes me wonder what other amazing discoveries are just out of reach (or even within reach...) The world is more complex than we see; all we need do is look (a lot...) - There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio - Nature's imagination is greater than your imagination

From the article, it seem to not be so much that it enables healing, but that it enables healing without scars. I expect this is crucial in some situations, but it's not clear that it can heal what wouldn't otherwise heal. Certainly, there are cosmetic applications.

Scientists Demonstrate Mammalian Regeneration Through a Single Gene Deletion

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