We as humans have a really limited regenerative ability. Whether it's due to
disease or injury, we just don't have the capacity to rebuild those tissues later in life.
But what if we could?
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Zebrafish are incredibly similar to humans. The genomes are more than 80%
identical. They're highly regenerative, Zebrafish can regenerate their spinal
cords, their fins, they could also regenerate portions of their heart.
In adult humans, you have a small capacity to regenerate. In the example of a spinal
cord injury in a human, cells come in and try to wall off this damage to keep it
from spreading and they end up forming the scar which on one hand is beneficial,
but it ends up being very anti growth. There's absolutely no option of
regeneration past it and that's where patients find themselves losing the
ability to walk again.
In Zebrafish, none of those kind of negative phenomenon occur.
You can have a very similar type of damage of the spinal cord after
injury, but instead of forming this kind of
really dense scar, cells actually create highways or bridges across the injury
site. With these bridges being formed these axons are allowed to cross back through
the injury site, remake connections and within about a month
it's able to swim again.
The genes that are necessary to kind of drive these regenerative events, they
exist in humans, but in humans it's almost like they've become dormant.
If we can figure out how the cells are communicating or how they're making this
Pro regenerative switch, we have the potential then to ask is any of this
harnessable in a human? Are there ways that we can manipulate the human nervous
system to reinitiate this dormant regenerative gene that could aid in the
regeneration after injury and disease?
What we learn could lead us to understand something very important in
human health and discover things that would allow us to rebuild our bodies.
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