![]() ![]() ![]() Within days, the head piece grows a tail. After a few minutes of stretching and ripping, it separates into two halves-a head and a tail. The planarian begins as a small, flattened, sluglike creature with a spade-shaped head and two googly eyes. Others, more straightforwardly, tear themselves in two. “With this work, we now know that bioelectric properties can permanently override the default body shape called for by a genome, that regenerative target morphology can be edited to diverge from the current anatomy, and that bioelectric networks can be a control point for investigating cryptic, previously unobservable phenotypes ," said Levin.When planarian flatworms want to reproduce, some have sex. Image courtesy of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University. A two-headed flatworm created during the study. The researchers concluded that the worms had morphological memory traces coded into their bioelectric patterns, which had been permanently altered by their treatment. It seems the flatworms’ pattern memory had been altered, although this was not apparent in their intact state and was revealed only upon regeneration. The researchers also found that the worms they thought were unaffected by the treatment – as they had regrown normally after the initial treatment – still regenerated the wrong part around 25 percent of the time. They found that, again, the flatworms regenerated the wrong part 25 percent of the time. ![]() Once the worms had regenerated, the team then repeated the amputation experiment on them, without giving them a second treatment. Wikimedia Commons / Taisaku Nogi, Dan Zhang, John D. A two-headed Dugesia japonica flatworm from an earlier study. Twenty-five percent of the worms regenerated into double-headed forms, while 72 percent were normal (with the remaining 3 percent not growing properly). The Sunniest Place On Earth Is Like Standing On Venusįor the study, published in Biophysical Journal, Michael Levin and his team used the chemical octanol to block the channels that electrical signals travel through in the worms.Īfter this, they split the worms. ![]()
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