Scars and stripesVERTEBRATE animals, human beings included, are constantly changing their skin—producing new layers of it as old cells slough off from the surface. Understanding this process of regeneration would help the treatment of skin diseases and of injuries such as burns. This week, a group of researchers led by Kenneth Poss of Duke University Medical Centre, in North Carolina, have announced a colourful new technique that should enhance such understanding. They dub it the “skinbow”.
Skinbows are themselves an adaptation of an approach called a “brainbow”, invented almost a decade ago, that is used to label nerve cells different colours. Brainbow technology permits someone with an appropriate microscope to trace the connections that lots of individual nerve cells make with one another in the brain of, say, a mouse.
Dr Poss’s experimental animal is not a mammal but a fish: the zebrafish. This species is widely employed in the study of embryology, and is thus well understood. Skinbow or brainbow, though, the basic procedure is the same. Genetic engineering is used to create lines of animals...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/25n3fmW
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