A strange, immortal tube-shaped animal has been discovered to regenerate a whole new body from only its mouth to avoid getting old.
This creature, named Hydractinia symbiolongicarpus, a tiny invertebrate that lives on the shells of crabs, is usually immune to aging altogether, but was found to use aging within its body to grow an entirely new body, a study published in the journal Cell Reports found.
“Studies like this that explore the biology of unusual organisms reveal both how universal many biological processes are and how much we have yet to understand about their functions, relationships and evolution,” Charles Rotimi, co-author of the paper and director of the Intramural Research Program at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health, said in a statement. “Such findings have great potential for providing novel insights into human biology.”
Hydractinia had previously been found to have special stem cells that it used for regenerating its tissues.
OpenAccess Paper:
Senescence-induced cellular reprogramming drives cnidarian whole-body regeneration
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(23)00698-8
