Darnet, S. et al. PNAS 116, 15106–15115 (2019)

The ability to regrow lost tissue is common to some groups of animals while quite rare among others. The latter includes humans and most members of our ‘lobe-finned’ evolutionary lineage. The exceptions (among adults) are the salamanders and the lungfishes. An international team of collaborators took a closer look at how the lungfishes regrow their fins.

The team directly assessed the regenerative ability of several different fishes and then looked more closely at one in particular: Polypterus senegalus bichirs. They transcriptionally profiled the blastema—the bud from which new tissue grows after an amputation–from bichir and the axolotl, a well-established salamander model of limb regeneration. The comparison revealed that similar genetic programming seems to be involved in the process, suggesting evolutionary conserved mechanisms for further study.