With the bringing of a new year and a new president, legislation is changing in Washington these days at a tremendous pace. Perhaps any day now, we are expected to see a unilateral lift of the previous bans on embryonic stem cell research enforced by the previous administration. In doing so, many in the scientific world are becoming very optimistic in terms of our future ability to cure and prevent disease. Interestingly, recent research conducted by a team at New York University’s Center for Genomics and Systems Biology and Utrecht University-Netherlands has found that plants might not be as dependent on stem cells for regeneration as we once thought.

It has been widely known in the plant research community that plants’ remarkable ability to re-grow their branches and roots is a direct effect of their usage of stem cells for regeneration. What the community did not know; however, was that plants are also able to use their ordinary cells to build and rebuild critical organs.

Like many studies discussed on this site, this study too was conducted on Arabidopsis thaliana, a good plant to use for research because scientists have largely identified all of its expressed genes.
To conduct the study, the team at NYU and Utrecht first cut off the plant’s root tip, a critical component of the plant that contains its “stem cell niche”. They then proceeded to examine the return of cells to the wounded area and recorded all gene activity. During this investigation, they were surprised to find that the plant’s normal cells began the process of regeneration of all the major tissues lost after the excision.

Kenneth Birnbaum, an assistant professor of biology at NYU, said of the study, “You could think of these findings as a massive reprogramming of an organ’s identity without the need for a stem cell niche. Here is a case of an organism that can perform this kind of reprogramming naturally. This may be one reason why plants are so adept at regenerating their body parts.”

Much to the disliking of X-Men fans around the world, unfortunately we as humans do not possess this unique ability to regenerate injured organs using our natural cells. We can, however, take this remarkable natural phenomenon in plants as inspiration on our quest to better understand how we can use stem cells to achieve a similar feat. It is the hope of scientists that one day, we will be able to use this knowledge to rid the world of the countless diseases that plague humanity today.

Discussion Question: We have all heard that the liver is the only human organ capable of self regeneration. In fact, as little as 25% of a liver can regenerate into a whole liver. Do you think stem cells play a role here?

News Article Link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090128132645.htm

Scientific Article Link: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature07597.html