Brittle stars unravel secrets of regeneration
What makes some animals capable of regrowing lost limbs? Our paper out in Nature Ecology & Evolution, led by Elise Parey with contributions from Olga Ortega-Martinez, Paola Oliveri and many others, takes on this question through the genome of the brittle star Amphiura filiformis, one of the most striking examples of appendage regeneration in the animal kingdom. Beyond the genome itself, by profiling gene expression throughout arm regeneration and comparing it across animals, we uncovered hundreds of genes with conserved dynamics from crustaceans to vertebrates, pointing to a surprisingly ancient origin of the regenerative toolkit. Here is UCL press release
