Enviable Abilities

To help repair human injuries and developmental defects, researchers are keen to harness the remarkable abilities of organisms that can heal their wounds and even grow new limbs with seeming ease. One such in this study, the formidably named panther worm (belying their millimetre dimensions; Hofstenia miamia) is revealed to have two distinct modes of wound closure depending on which of its epithelial layers are injured, and has, the team say, "a wide tool kit of strategies" for repair leading to regeneration regardless of the context of the injury. In the image is highlighted the outer epidermis (bright blue, left) and inner pharyngeal epithelium (pink, right)

Read the published research article here

Written by Lindsey Goff

Lindsey Goff

Editor-in-Chief

Formerly immunologist for Cancer Research UK, Lindsey has since moved into the field of scientific publishing. She looks after all BPoD editorial matters.

• Image from work by Allison P. Kann & Mansi Srivastava
• Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, August 2026