Sleep could be an ancestral property of animals. A jelly on, a jellyfish has a nervous system, but not a brain,. Got it? And is it still floating in the water when it's sleeping, or does it go to the ground? Does it take a nap on the bed? In the species that we studied it, it stays on the ground while the species is is stationary. It does not float. So, but what happens is, tat when it sleeps, and it sleeps at night, it calls us less frequently, ok. Probably this has some sort of regenerative function of some sort, right? Catching up, repairing itself, yes. Ah, we don
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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