Understanding the rapid growth of deer antlers could have applications in medicine
Science
23 Feb 2023
Vol 379, Issue 6634
pp. 757–758
Abstract
Understanding the biology underlying the regeneration of animal limbs, organs, and tissues could be a source of potential applications in medicine. Antlers of deer are a particularly good example because they show complete morphological, structural, and functional regeneration every year, unlike compensatory regeneration in response to injury, for example, as seen in the liver (1, 2). An outstanding characteristic of the antler is the speed of regeneration: They can grow up to 2.75 cm per day and reach up to 15 kg in mass and 120 cm in length in ∼3 months (3). How do deer antlers achieve such rapid and complete regeneration? On page 840 of this issue, Qin et al. (4) identify a population of antler blastema progenitor cells (ABPCs) that are responsible for the antler regenerative cycle. These findings add to the emerging idea that blastema progenitor cells are a common stem cell type in mammalian appendage regeneration.
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References and Notes
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Science
Volume 379 | Issue 6634
24 February 2023
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Copyright © 2023 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.
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Published in print: 24 February 2023
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Acknowledgments
D.W. is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31901058) and the China Scholarship Council. T.L.-C. is supported by the Spanish National Cancer Association (AECC) (UCLM 2022-AYUDA-33655).
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Datao Wang
Institute of Special Animal and Plant Sciences, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Changchun, China.
Instituto de Investigación en Recursos Cinegéticos (IREC) e IDR, Universidad de Castilla–La Mancha (UCLM), Albacete, Spain.
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