Is Your Skin Cells Dying Off?

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All of us have capacity forwhat we call tissue repair, or maintaining tissue homeo statis. We our skin cells completely, ad rapidly turned over, continually turnd over during lifetime. The cells that make up our skin are replaced every two or three weeks,. So rans you're a completely different person. Bu sn appearance, sellwise, every few weeks or so.

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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