Salamander’s Genome Guards Secrets of Limb Regrowth

Salamander’s Genome Guards Secrets of Limb Regrowth

6 years ago
Anonymous $TjsaxHwAP-

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/salamander-rsquo-s-genome-guards-secrets-of-limb-regrowth/

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here).

In a loudly bubbling laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, about 2,800 of the salamanders called axolotls drift in tanks and cups, filling floor-to-ceiling shelves. Up close, axolotls are just on the cute side of alien. They have fleshy pink bodies and guileless, wall-eyed faces. Unlike most salamanders, which metamorphose into land-dwellers as they grow up, axolotls usually keep their youthful aquatic form for their whole lives. They wear their gills on the outside, a set of three feathery horns on each side of the head. Their four-fingered hands with black nails are delicate and vaguely human—but perhaps it’s best not to dwell on that, given the work that goes on here.