Master of regeneration – not without stem cells

Research report (imported) 2013 - Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine

Authors
Bartscherer, Kerstin
Departments
Forschungsgruppe Stammzellen und Regeneration
Summary
Planarians are known as masters of regeneration: they can re-build any part of their body after amputation. This ability relies on a large amount of pluripotent stem cells. To further investigate the mechanisms of how planarians maintain their stem cell pool over generations, scientists have now established a method for analyzing the composition of planarian stem cells and the turnover of their proteins. They discovered a protein that is not only required for the maintenance of the stem cell pool in planarians, but which might also be active in the pluripotent stem cells of mammals.

For the full text, see the German version.

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