Sea cucumbers are the champions of organ regrowth because they direct their wound healing abilities towards restoring their organs, according to research published in the online open access journal, BMC Developmental Biology.
The discovery that Holothuria glaberrima uses similar cellular mechanisms during wound healing and organ regeneration gives us the opportunity to discover how to repair our own wounds and, perhaps eventually, how to regenerate body parts.
The research was carried out by the investigators José San Miguel-Ruiz and José García-Arrarás, at the University of Puerto Rico. "Sea cucumbers should be viewed as the tissue regeneration equivalent of the squid for our knowledge of nerves and Drosophila for genes and the genome. They can help us learn to fix ourselves," commented Professor Garcia-Arraras. "Many people, including scientists, regard sea cucumbers and other echinoderms like star fish and brittle stars as bizarre, exceptional outcasts because of their regenerative abilities. But we've shown that they use the same 'ordinary' mechanisms and processes to both regenerate and heal wounds."