Super Worm

Panther worms (Hofstenia miamia) are used to horrific injury – they will happily take bites out of each other when hungry. It’s all part of life for an animal that can regenerate its entire body. H.miamia can regrow its tail, its muscles, even its brain. In fact, if you chopped it to bits, new worms would grow from the pieces. Here researchers use genomic engineering to make its embryonic stem cells transgenic – introducing genes that produce green and red fluorescent proteins and highlighting different tissues in the developing worm. Under a confocal microscope, researchers spot growing muscle acting as a sort of scaffold for the developing skin (red) to crawl up. With these techniques in hand, one next step is to investigate how the worm regenerates completely – perhaps finding similarities in human stem cells that could be guided to heal wounds.

Written by John Ankers

• Image by Lorenzo Ricci, Srivastava Lab
• Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Published in Developmental Cell, November 2021