14 DAY TRIAL // Lizards can regrow a tail, octopuses their lost arms and some salamanders like axolotl even lost limbs. But sea cucumbers are the champions of organ regrowth: they can barf their whole gut out to escape predators and regrow it. Now a study made at the University of Puerto Rico connected their wound healing skills with that of regrowing their organs.
The finding that the sea cucumber species Holothuria glaberrima employs the same cellular mechanisms for wound healing and organ regeneration could enable people to develop techniques of repairing wounds and even to regrow body parts.
"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," said lead researcher Professor Jose Garcia-Arraras at the University of Puerto Rico.
"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." he added.
All animals can operate some type of tissue repair mechanism up to a certain extent, but the sea cucumber can literally empty itself and regenerate after that. Over a period of four weeks, the team discovered that sea cucumbers healed up quickly after being cut for 3 to 5 mm along the body wall.
The repair was made by special cells named morula heading to the injury site and full repair occurred in just about weeks. The cellular events taking place during the healing of sea cucumber muscular, nervous and dermal tissues were the same with those seen during intestinal regeneration, comprising extracellular matrix remodeling and the dedifferentiation of muscle cells.
Even if all animal species present wound repair processes, not all can regenerate wounded or lost body parts. The team wants to go further at the molecular level to see what impedes healing processes to regeneration organs in other animals.
"Many of these regenerative mechanisms are the same as those being used by other animals to heal and repair - this includes us humans. Sea cucumbers will probably provide us with the key to deciphering how to regenerate our tissues, or at least find out what is needed to do this." said Garcia-Arraras