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Article: MEET FLATWORM, ANIMAL MODEL FOR REGENERATION KNOCKOUT PLANARIAN PRIES OPEN SECRET OF HOW SOME ORGANISMS CAN COPY BODY IN PART OR WHOLE.
- Article from:
- BIOWORLD Today
- Article date:
- May 5, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 A Thomson Healthcare Company. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Just over a century ago, in 1898, geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945) sliced a small flatworm, or planarian, into 279 bits and pieces. Each tiny fragment regenerated a complete animal.
"Morgan concluded," observed molecular embryologist Alejandro Sanchez Alvarado, "that these planarians were so mysterious that he decided to abandon them. Morgan moved on to Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly, because he thought their genetics offered a more tractable problem. And that was a good move," he added. "Thanks to Morgan we have modern genetics, Drosophila genes and the drosophilosophers who study them."
Sanchez Alvarado is a staff scientist at the ...