Did you know that over a million people every year have an arm or a leg amputated for various reasons ever year? And while it looks cool in the movies as super humans grow their limbs back with ease, in real life, it is much more difficult.
Regenerative medicine has made a long way, and today it is possible to grow a heart and nerve cells from scratch, but limbs are a different story…until now?
For the first time ever, scientists were able to identify the proteins needed to kickstart limb formation. That’s right! Wolverine here we come! But let’s get it right for a second, they manage to do that in animal embryo development.
The published study was released on Development Cell and the research found that amazingly there are only three gene-transcription that factor proteins in mice were enough to convert non-limb-forming stem cells into limb-forming-cells.
The team used that new info later to transform cultured mouse cells into limb progenitor cells in the lab as well.
This is an amazing and vital first step on a long road to maybe, just maybe repair or even replace lost limbs in people.
Here’s what ChanHee Lee had to say ( geneticist at Harvard Medical School ) ” We basically were able to create the conditions to anchor the cell state in the early limb progenitor state, which maintains the potential to create all parts of the limb, ”
If you want more specific details, the team analyzed patterns of gene expression in mouse embryo and were able to identify the specific proteins: Prdm16, ZBTb16 and Lin28a as the three to drive the transformation of cells in embryo tissue known as mesenchyme into limb progenitor cells.
What these limb progenitor cells do is bud out where a limb needs to be formed and kinda set the platform for the future arm or keg to be developed.
Lee continues ” These three factors were not among our predictions, like among the list that we thought would create a limb ”
While the knowledge of these three genes were known before and was largely counted as involved in the later stages of limb formation, this is the first evidence that they are essential at the very start of the process.
The discovery already started new experiments that help push the issue years ahead and maybe show promising results.
Lee says that next steps in the research are to identify more genetic pathways and changes to actually grow a limb. ” Now we are in a position, ” he says, and the future has never looked better in this regard.
