Planaria are freshwater flatworms that have become a key model for studying regeneration and stem cells, as they can regenerate any part of the body, even the head. But how does the animal know what ...

Full-body defense does not always look the way textbooks say it should. In planarian flatworms, a newly identified cell type appears to protect the body by bursting apart, releasing a lethal chemical ...

If you dissect a planarian (Schmidtea mediterranea)—a flatworm about half an inch long—into 279 tiny fragments, each fragment can regrow into an entire animal. New research from the lab of Alejandro ...

As you age you naturally lose neurons and muscle mass and experience a decline in fertility and wound healing ability. Previous research in animals has offered several potential techniques for turning ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. For decades, scientists have studied planarians as the poster child for regeneration. (CREDIT: Stowers Institute for Medical ...

For those of us whose memory of high school biology hasn’t faded entirely, planarians will probably sound very familiar. They’re generally used as an example of one of the extreme ends of regenerative ...

Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, president and chief science officer of Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, has been studying planarian ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Researchers report in the journal Developmental Cell that they have identified genes that control growth and regeneration of the intestine in the freshwater planarian Schmidtea ...