Master of healing

Scientists have discovered flatworms to be a promising tool for stem cell research

Need for a new head? No problem! Just cut off the old one and the next head is already growing again. Although it sounds like Science Fiction, it is already working for milions of years. At least with the flatworm Schmidtea mediterranea: no matter if you chop off its head or if you cut it into hundred pieces – the missing part always grows back again. A new animal has developed from each snippet after two weeks at the latest. Yet it is still unclear as of how the worm is doing this. Scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster have now discovered a protein that plays a key role in the impressive regeneration process – and amazingly, this protein also exists in humans in a related form. The team of Luca Gentile and Hans Schöler reports on this finding in the current issue of the scientific journal Development (April 01, 2010).