ISO...

...Edible starfish. Did you know starfish and salamanders have incredible powers of regeneration? I think I knew it about salamanders, but didn't know about starfish. But during a conversation with Matt today, the topic of starfish regeneration came up. (We have such intellectual conversations, Matt and I. I can hardly keep up, but he talks with me anyway!)

I started to wonder if there might be any research being done along starfish lines and found this:

Scientists Search Starfish For Key to Human Regeneration

By Brandon Keim April 06, 2007 | 4:09:14 PMCategories: Biology, Stem Cell Research

Hoping to discover whether the limb-regrowing powers of creatures like starfish and salamanders hold the secret to human renewal, University of Florida researchers are set to embark on a $6 million Regeneration Project.

Yesterday I talked with Dennis Steindler, project leader and head of the U of F's McKnight Brain Institute, about research developments that have laid a foundation for the latest wave of regeneration research. Said Dennis:

The big question everybody thought about in what used to be called developmental biology, is now called regenerative medicine, is this: why do some organisms readily repair themselves, and others don’t? And even in a single large organism, why do some tissues reapir themselves and regenerate, and others don’t? We needed to get to a level, thanks to the revolution in molecular genetics and now the revolution in stem cell biology, where we could really tackle those questions.

Now we have the human genome mapped, and genomes are being mapped from almost every organism you can think of. We needed to know that there are so-called adult stem cells, or tissue-specific stem cells, in all organisms. These are there not by coincidence but to attempt and often succeed at repairing injury. Even the adult human brain has a persistent stem cell population that lives in an area we used to anecdotally refer to as brain marrow, which looks like bone marrow, which makes blood and other cells.

We needed to know that these cells exist, and where they do, and that if there are not stem cells in all tissues and organisms, there are certainly progenitor cells that persist all through life that have certain stem cell-like qualities and often attempt repair all by themselves -- but, depending on injury or disease, they get overwhelmed and fail at regeneration.

All this is coming together now -- not just relating to human regeneration, but to other organisms. And we’ve got the material I think we need now to start to comparing them.

Check out the article here. And check out the University site here.

Pretty cool. I wrote to the University to see what the latest and greatest was and they WROTE BACK and said they'd try to get something to me in the next several days. We shall see what comes of this.

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I paid $2.60 for gas tonight. Heard on the news coming home that the market tanked--again--and the cost of a barrel of oil went below $68 or $60 or something. And we lost 750,000 jobs. 750,000!!! AND the British pound, at $1.64, is less than what the Euro was back in April. What a world we live in today. Scares the shit out of me. I hope those crazy mavericky people get sent home on November 4.

But I digress. While at the gas station I had a hard time with the pump. It was so hard to squeeze I asked a nice man in the truck behind me if he could pump my gas for me. He very kindly did, and secured the cap for me when finished. Here's to you, kind truck driving Coast Guard man.

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Now. Back to my search for edible starfish.