Signal to Regeneration

One of the enduring questions in biology is understanding why mammals, unlike amphibians, are unable to regenerate their limbs. Recently, our knowledge of this fascinating and clinically relevant topic has evolved from tissue-level observations in amphibians to comprehensive cellular characterizations. My research was among the first to uncover the cellular composition of regeneration using single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-Seq), revealing the critical mechanisms of regenerative epithelial signaling center cell types (Aztekin et al., 2019, 2021). Building on this, my lab has established the equivalence of these cell types across species, including mammals (Zhong et al., 2023). Concurrently, we have developed novel, simplified models to probe their properties in detail (Aztekin et al., 2021