earch and the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell said that the scientific world was aware of the regeneration capacity of the lampreys but was not aware of how they were doing it. The molecular level mechanism was not clear. These genes have now been found to exist in the mammals too. Some of these include those for, “axon guidance and regeneration, synaptic transmission, neural patterning and neurodegeneration.” The authors find that the lamprey central nervous system us analogous to humans and other vertebrates that have jaws unlike the lampreys.
For this study the team obsevered the genetic workings of the lampreys after their spinal cords were severed. They took their observations at several points including ones within hours after injury, until the fish had completely recovered at the end of 3 months. They noted that genes changed with the time as the regeneration progressed to completion. The changes in the transcription genes were also seen in the brains they noted. “One of the most surprising findings from this study is the robust and complex transcriptional responses occurring in the lamprey brain after SCI,” authors write. In fact at the time of recovery, they noted 238 newly formed and expressed transcripts in the spinal cord and 88 new transcripts in the brain. Morgan explains that this shows that the brain and spinal cord changes during regeneration process significantly.
The team also found that 3 percent of these new transcripts were from the Wnt pathways. These belong to the “Wnt and Frizzled gene families,” the researchers add. These 19 mammalian Wnt genes are seen commonly among many animal species they say. These pathways have been shown to play a role in spinal injury. Zebrafish and salamanders have been shown to use this pathway for regeneration in previous experiments. Morgan said that when they stopped these Wnt signaling pathway using certain drugs, the lampreys could not recover from their spinal injury and could not swim again. The reason why this pathway works how it does is what the team is studying now.