The green anole lizard is master of a well-known trick: it can disconnect its tail in a jam and grow a new one. It's not only impressive, but enviable: regrowing broken or missing body parts has long been the dream of regenerative medicine. Now scientists have unlocked the secret to the lizard’s regenerative abilities, and it lies, in large part, within genes that humans share with the reptiles.
Several other animals like salamanders and fish have regenerative abilities, but the anole lizard does it in a different way. Its pattern of tissue growth is distributed throughout the tail, whereas other animals focus their growth at the tip. And lizards are the most closely-related animals to humans that can regenerate entire appendages. To inspect the genetic activity in a regenerating tail, researchers removed mid-growth tails from five lizards. They cut each tail into sections, and conducted a genetic analysis of each ...
