Have a look to our new paper in Development !!!

Check out our lab latest paper “Planarian cell number depends on Blitzschnell, a novel gene family that balances cell proliferation and cell death” published in Development.

https://dev.biologists.org/content/early/2020/02/28/dev.184044

This is the work of Eudald and several current ad past students in the lab.

Congratulations to all of them!

In this work we report the identification of a novel gene family, blitzschnell (bls), which consists of de novo and taxonomically restricted genes that control cell proliferation:cell death ratio. Their silencing promotes faster regeneration and increases cell number during homeostasis. Importantly, this increase in cell number only leads to an increase in body size in a nutrient-rich environment; in starved planarians silencing results in a decrease in cell size and cell accumulation that ultimately produces overgrowths. bls expression is down-regulated after feeding and related with the Insulin/Akt/mTOR network activity, suggesting that the bls family evolved in planarians as an additional mechanism by which to restrict cell number in nutrient-fluctuating environments.