Question: how do you think zebra fish regenarate organs?

Juan Carlos Lopez-Baez answered on 21 Mar 2014:

@ghostlykitty92 Great question! 😉

Well, I can tell you what we know on how they regenerate for now (it might be the only way the regenerate or we might uncover new ways, who knows!).

First, one of the way s they regenerate is by using some special type of cells called “stem cells”. You probably have heard a lot about them in the news, as these cells are cells that can make different types of cells, some are restricted to making only the specific cells of an organ (like blood stem cells, which make all the cells in your blood) and some can actually make many cells from different organs at the same time or even a whole new person (these are called embryonic stem cells). Well, zebrafish has a lot of organs and tissues that have these cells in them and when they get damage, they activate these cells which start producing new cells and regrowing the damaged area.

The second way is by creating these stem cells. This happens when the tissues don’t normally have stem cells. This is the most interesting for scientists as this is something that humans aren’t able to do (we do have stem cells in some of our organs, but cannot make them from scratch like the zebrafish). They do this by making the normal cells change the genes they express (these are the bits of DNA that tell the cells what and how to be) and start expressing the genes needed to be stem cells. After that they start making the cells needed to regrow and repair the injury. This process is called “dedifferentiation” (I know, big word).

As I said, humans have stem cells in some organs and we are actually able to regenerate some of them thanks to it (like for example our skin), but we are just not as good at doing that as zebrafish, so we think we can learn a lot from them.