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Our bodies are perfectly capable of renewing billions of cells every day but fail miserably when it comes to replacing damaged organs such as kidneys. Using the flatworm Schmidtea mediterranea—famous for its capacity to regrow complete animals from minuscule flecks of tissue—as an eloquent example, researchers at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research demonstrated how our distant evolutionary cousins regenerate their excretory systems from scratch.

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Stowers researchers pinpoint the Super Elongation Complex as a major regulator in the coordinated expression of early developmental genes.

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Successful gene expression requires the concerted action of a host of regulatory factors. Long overshadowed by bonafide transcription factors, coactivators—the hanger-ons that facilitate transcription by docking onto transcription factors or modifying chromatin—have recently come to the fore.

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A report from the Conaway lab at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in the July 8, 2011, edition of the journal Cell identifies a switch that allows RNA polymerase to shift gears from neutral into drive and start transcribing. This work sheds light on a process fundamental to all plant or animal cells and suggests how transcriptional anomalies could give rise to tumors.

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Renowned developmental biologist Tatjana Piotrowski, Ph.D., and trailblazing regeneration expert Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, Ph.D., joined the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, the Institute announced today.