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Researchers unlock the secret to perfect regeneration

Researchers unlock the secret to perfect regeneration

Although this sounds like something taken out of the latest Spiderman movie, a team of scientists has identified the type of cells that help salamanders to regenerate entire limbs, and this could lead us to medical breakthroughs down the road.

That might seem like a bit of a leap, but these cells, called macrophages, are not only found in salamanders, but in our own bodies as well. Doctors and scientists have known about macrophages for awhile now (nearly 130 years). Their name means 'big eaters', because they basically go around inside us, eating up any dead cells and germs they can find. They're also known to help our muscles to grow, repair and regenerate.

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Humans certainly can't regenerate whole organs and limbs, but it was the macrophages' role in muscle regeneration that got Dr. James Godwin, a researcher at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute, interested in seeing if they were what gave salamanders their remarkable ability to regenerate.

As Dr. Godwin says on his webpage:

"Salamanders are unique in that they can regenerate a vast number of clinically relevant body structures as an adult, including their limbs, tails, jaws, sections of the heart, ocular tissues, and parts of the brain and spinal cord."

To find the answer of whether macrophages played a role in this, Godwin and his team, Dr. Alex Pinto and Prof. Nadia Rosenthal, removed the macrophages from salamanders and then watched to see if they could still regenerate. They couldn't. If a limb was amputated, it simply healed over, as it would if a person suffered a similar wound. When the salamanders recovered their macrophages, the limb was re-amputated and it grew right back.

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Figuring out how to let humans completely regrow arms, legs, organs, and even our brain and spinal cord, is likely to be pretty far down the road from his discovery. In fact, the researchers are just working now to see if they can apply this to let people heal injuries without developing a lot of scar tissue.

If this does lead to human regeneration, we'll just have to hope that years of comic-book writing don't turn out to be prophetic after all, as things didn't turn out so well for poor Dr. Connors.

(Images courtesy: Wikimedia Commons and Reuters)

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