A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests that the genes of salamanders could hold they key to human limb regeneration. David A. Brown, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Surgery in the Division of Plastic, Maxillofacial, and Oral Surgery, served as the paper's first author and principal investigator of a grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development that partially funded the study. Aravind Asokan, PhD, Professor in Surgery and Director of Gene Therapy, served as a collaborator on the study through contribution of new reagents and analytics tools.
The study was a collaborative effort between the labs of Dr. Brown, Josh Currie, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biology at Wake Forest; and Kenneth D. Ross, PhD, Professor of Cell and Regenerative Biology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
The three laboratories each studied one of three different organisms which share part of the same genetic machinery when they regenerate damaged body parts: mouse digit tips (Brown Laboratory), axolotl salamander limbs (Currie Laboratory), and zebrafish fins (Poss Laboratory).
With more than 57 million people worldwide living with limb loss as of 2017, according to the paper, the researchers are analyzing whether human biology can do more to recreate the full sensory and motor abilities of a living limb than modern prosthetics can.
The team found activity from two related genes, Sp6 and Sp8, in the epidermal layer that forms over a wound soon after amputation in all three species' regeneration.
Read more about the study and its findings on Yahoo! News, and read the full study on PNAS.