No matter how you slice it, the freshwater planarian possesses an amazing ability to regenerate lost body parts.
Chop one into pieces, and each piece can grow into a complete planarian. The flatworm relies upon a population of stem cells to accomplish this remarkable feat; recent work sheds light on how planarians maintain these stem cells throughout their lives.
In a paper to appear in the August issue of the journal Developmental Cell, scientists show that a member of the Bruno-like family of RNA binding proteins - produced by a gene found in both planarians and humans - plays a vital role in maintaining the stem cell population in the planarian Schmidtea mediterranea. The work could lead to a better understanding of the fundamental mechanisms by which stem cells are regulated; such basic understanding is required for the successful therapeutic application of stem cells in humans.
"One of the defining characteristics of stem cells is their ability to self-renew - that is, to make more stem cells in addition to differentiating into multiple cell types," said Phillip A. Newmark, a professor of cell and developmental biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and corresponding author of the paper. "We found that in the absence of this protein, the stem cells could respond to wound stimuli, proliferate, and differentiate, but they were unable to self-renew. As a result, the regeneration process failed and the animals died."