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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."
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.
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.
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.
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