How do some animals, like frog tadpoles or salamanders, regrow their lost limbs while humans cannot?
We are interested in understanding how cellular behaviors drive limb and tail regeneration, which cell type interactions are critical for these processes, and what goes differently in limb regeneration-incompetent mammals. Our research primarily aims to address fundamental questions that could enable human limb regeneration in the future.
Our methodology
Since human limb regeneration is a challenging task, we need a comprehensive and diverse toolkit to study appendage regeneration.
We study limb and tail regeneration-competent tadpoles (Xenopus laevis) and regeneration-incompetent mice (Mus musculus). We take advantage of cutting-edge sequencing and imaging technologies and harmonize their use with traditional developmental biology approaches.
Not every question can be easily answered by studying whole animals. Therefore, we are developing and using simplified culture systems to grow limbs in a dish without the need for animal bodies, allowing us to perform many experiments at an unprecedented speed and to gain new insights into limb regeneration.
Why tadpoles?
Tadpoles are the larval stage of frogs, and they offer several unique advantages for unraveling the mysteries of regeneration. First, they are the only commonly used laboratory animals that develop their limbs and perform limb regeneration very similarly to mammals. Therefore, our findings in tadpoles are more likely to be generalizable to mammals. Second, tadpoles progressively lose their ability to regenerate limbs during development, allowing us to compare regeneration-competent and regeneration-incompetent stages of the same animal to identify potential changes that lead to regeneration failure.