How Does the Organism Know When to Stop?

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How does the organism know the shape that it wants to be, or does not want to be in a certain shape to begin with? That's a fascinating question. I mean, maybe we can get more clues. So we have the jellyfish and but the flies and the mice, somehow, this is my human parochialism, it seems more astonishing to me that you can get them to re grow limbs. Jelly fish is like, its jellylike, how hard can it be? But the a is, it is the thing that re grows on the a fli. And the mice, are they just as functional? Or is it like a stunted little thing? Right?

Biological organisms are pretty good at healing themselves, but their abilities fall short in crucial ways. Planaria can be cut into pieces, and each piece will regrow into an entire organism; but for most advanced animals, loss of a limb becomes a permanent condition. But why should that necessarily be so, if an organism’s genome knows what it’s supposed to look like? Lea Goentoro’s lab has recently produced surprising results that indicate that it’s easier than you might think to coax animals into regenerating limbs.

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Lea Goentoro received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Princeton University. She is currently Professor of Biology at Caltech. Her research involves how biological systems function and develop across a variety of scales, including perception, organization, and self-repair.

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