Question: how do zebra fish re generate

Juan Carlos Lopez-Baez answered on 12 Mar 2014:

Hello @gouldie

Zebrafish regenerate in different ways depending on the tissue. In some tissues, they have special types of cells called stem cells which are in charge of creating new cells. In other tissues they don’t have these cells, so they create them after damage by a process called “dedifferentiation”. In this process, normal cells undergo changes in their information to create new stem cells that can create the cells needed for regeneration.

Zebrafish are great animals and they can regenerate all sorts of tissues, including their fins, their spinal chord, their brains, their eyes, their muscles, their bones, their kidneys, their skin and their liver, so we can learn a lot from them.

That doesn’t mean we cannot regenerate and there are some of our organs that are constantly regenerating, such as the skin and the cells in our blood. In the skin and in our blood system we are constantly loosing cells, but these are quickly replenished with brand new cells all the time. This is the reason why if you have a wound, it heals in time and if you give blood, you won’t miss it for too long as you will make new blood cells very quickly. We also have constant regeneration in our intestines, where cells are also constantly being replaced. Other organs only regenerate if they become damaged, such as our livers, our muscles and parts of our brain too.