Researchers Identify Gene Involved in Regeneration

v1x writes "Researchers at the University of Utah School of Medicine have discovered that when a gene called smedwi-2 is silenced in the adult stem cells of planarians, the quarter-inch long worm is unable to carry out a biological process that has mystified scientists for centuries, regeneration."

Re:I for one...

[cytoman]

You don't realize how true your words can actually turn out to be!! The most fascinating point of the research, which the submitter omitted completely, is the fact that a homologous gene is present in the Human genome!!

Now, just think of the implications of this research if we can somehow learn how this gene is regulated - no more amputations, no more diabetes type 1, no more any disease where a lost body part is gone forever!

Amazing, isn't it? I love to dream, but the reality may not turn out to be that ideal...but surely something amazing is going to result from these efforts by the Utah scientists.

Re:Logic 101

[penguin-collective]

Your comment applies to the summary, not the original paper. You can be certain that the original paper gets this right: biologists are sticklers for making sure statements about causation are correct in their papers (physicists, in contrast, are often quite sloppy about causation).

The thing to keep in mind for lay readers is that adding this gene to people won't automatically turn them into regenerating superheroes. However, indications are that understanding how this gene functions will tell us something useful about the mechanism by which stem cells are involved in regeneration, and that may have medical applications.

Re:Unfortunately

[Grayraven]

It's not really the same thing, cancer is uncontrolled cell division. Humans also regenerate tissue, but in a bit more limited fashion..

Re:More intelligent animals

[RockModeNick]

Planarians are NOT worms like earthworms, they're more related to a liver fluke I'd guess. And you can press one through a screen and many of the parts will survive to become worms. Also, they are trainable, you can teach them to always take a certain path at a fork, or train them to go to the side lit by a certain type of light(red or green) It just takes hundreds of trys to do it right everytime. Want REALLY weird - get this - If you juice and inject a trained worm into an untrained worm, it can learn in only a couple dozen trials to do it right everytime.

Re:More intelligent animals

[Anonymous Coward]

The effect you mentioned was due to an experimental error.

Specifically, the maze used to train the worms were not cleaned and chemical trails were left allowing faster training of untrained worms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_RNA [wikipedia.org]

Re:Unfortunately

[vertinox]

No, cancer is when the suicide/repair gene fails to kill the cell off and it keeps replicating uncontrolably. In humans the protein that does this is p53 [wikipedia.org] and does various things like (from the wiki article):

        * It can activate DNA repair proteins when it recognizes damaged DNA.
        * It can also hold the cell cycle at the G1/S regulation point on DNA damage recognition.
        * It can initiate apoptosis, the programmed cell death, if the DNA damage proves to be irrepairable.

Basically, cancer is uncontrolled production of cells with damaged DNA with no means of stoping it or killing it off. Regeneration, if they could pull it off, would hopefully produce cells with non-damaged or non-mutated DNA.