Body Builders: How Animals Regenerate New Parts
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April 14, 2021 @ 8:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Join the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture on Wednesday, April 14 for the Evolution Matters Lecture Series, supported by a generous gift from Drs. Herman and Joan Suit. Mansi Srivastava will highlight major insights about regeneration based on her team’s research on the three-banded panther worm, a marine invertebrate species that enables us to study how regeneration works plus how the process has evolved. She is a John L. Loeb associate professor of the natural sciences as well as curator of invertebrate zoology, organismic and evolutionary biology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.
Regeneration is a remarkable phenomenon in which an animal can regrow parts of its body that are lost or damaged by injury. Humans, for example, can repair some organs, but some animals can rebuild their entire bodies from small pieces of tissue. How do these animals accomplish this feat? Why is it that humans cannot regenerate as well as these animals can? Studies of how regeneration works at the molecular and cellular level are beginning to answer the first question. To answer the second question, we have to understand how regeneration has evolved.
The image is courtesy of Mansi Srivastava.