The long and short of it lies in the growth process
April 8th, 2010 - 4:23 pm ICT by IANS
Washington, April 8 (IANS) Wondering why you are so tall or so short? Scientists have found that ‘growth genes’ are not driven by age, but by the process of growth itself.
This has opened doors for organ regeneration as well as new treatments for abnormal body growth and cancer.
New research explains how we grow, how our bodies maintain correct proportions, and offers insight into what goes wrong with growth disorders and unregulated cell growth in cancer.
“We hope that these insights into the mechanisms controlling body growth will help us understand better the reasons for the excessive growth of cancer cells and also provide new approaches to turn growth back on in normal cells in order to regenerate damaged organs,” said Julian C. Lui.
Lui is a researcher from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
The scientists found that rapid growth in early life is a response to the activation of multiple genes that stimulate growth. These same genes are progressively turned off during the maturation process, causing growth to slow.
The process occurs simultaneously in multiple organs, which explains why organs stay in proportional size as the body grows. The process is not controlled by age. Instead, genes are turned off when organs achieve a certain level of growth.
“This important work answers the question of why any animal, including us, has a certain size,” said Gerald Weissmann, editor-in-chief of The FASEB Journal, which published the findings.
“As this study shows, growth is dictated by organ development, and no one wishes their organs to be abnormally large or small,” Weissmann aded.
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