| | |
Summary: The freshwater planarian Schmidtea mediterranea:
embryogenesis, stem cells and regeneration
Commentary
Alejandro Sa´ nchez Alvarado
Planarians have been used as a model to study development and
regeneration for more than 200 years. Research on these animals
has traditionally focused on surgical and pharmacological
manipulations. Recently, the dissection of planarians has
become more molecular in nature. The isolation of thousands of
expressed sequence tags and the introduction of in situ
hybridizations, immunocytology, and RNA-mediated gene
interference has opened the door to gene discovery and to the
study of gene function in planarians during development and
regeneration. These advances promise to shed mechanistic
insight into basic biological attributes such as regeneration and
stem-cell regulation.
Addresses
University of Utah School of Medicine, Department of Neurobiology and
Anatomy, 401 MREB 20 North 1900 East, Salt Lake City,
Utah 84132-3401, USA
|
