Biologists induce flatworms to grow heads and brains of other species

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Biologists induce flatworms to grow heads and brains of other species

Findings shed light on role of a new kind of epigenetic signaling in evolution, could yield clues for understanding birth defects, regeneration of organs

Tufts biologists induced one species of flatworm —- G. dorotocephala, top left — to grow heads and brains characteristic of other species of flatworm, top row, without altering genomic sequence. Examples of the outcomes can be seen in the bottom row of the image. (credit: Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology, School of Arts and Sciences, Tufts University.)

Tufts University biologists have electrically modified flatworms to grow heads and brains characteristic of another species of flatworm — without altering their genomic sequence. This suggests bioelectrical networks as a new kind of epigenetics (information existing outside of a genomic sequence) to determine large-scale anatomy.

Besides the overall shape of the head, the changes included the shape of the brain and the distribution of the worm’s adult stem cells.

The discovery could help improve understanding of birth defects and regeneration by revealing a new pathway for controlling complex pattern formation similar to how neural networks exploit bioelectric synapses to store and re-write information in the brain.

The findings are detailed in the open-access cover story of the November 2015 edition of the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, appearing online Nov. 24.

“These findings raise significant questions about how genes and bioelectric networks interact to build complex body structures,” said the paper’s senior author Michael Levin, Ph.D., who holds the Vannevar Bush Chair in biology and directs the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts. Knowing how shape is determined and how to influence it is important because biologists could use that knowledge, for example, to fix birth defects or cause new biological structures to grow after an injury, he explained.

How they did it

The researchers worked with Girardia dorotocephala — free-living planarian flatworms, which have remarkable regenerative capacity. They induced the development of different species-specific head shapes by interrupting gap junctions, which are protein channels that enable cells to communicate with each other by passing electrical signals back and forth…..More Here

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Biologists induce flatworms to grow heads and brains of other species