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The planarian flatworm Schmidtea mediterranea

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Planaria are a group of worms within the phylum Platyhelminthes (flatworms). Many species, including Schmidtea mediterranea, have the ability to regenerate their body from small pieces of tissue and are easy to keep in the laboratory, which makes them a prime model system for studying whole-body regeneration.

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Fig. 1: The model species S. mediterranea.
Fig. 2: Outgrowth of multiple heads after β-catenin-1 RNAi.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the whole planarian research community for the ongoing regeneration of the field and apologize to all those whose work we could not cite owing to the brevity of this column. We thank T. Boothe and J. Cleland for providing the whole-mount staining for Fig. 1c, and P. Ditte for β-catenin-1 RNAi animals. We thank all current and former laboratory members for their work and passion for understanding planarian biology. Our research is supported by the Max Planck Society and the Volkswagen Foundation (grant 94819).

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  1. Department of Tissue Dynamics and Regeneration, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen, Germany

    Leonard Drees & Jochen C. Rink

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  1. Leonard Drees
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Correspondence to Jochen C. Rink.

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Drees, L., Rink, J.C. The planarian flatworm Schmidtea mediterranea. Nat Methods 20, 3–5 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-022-01727-5

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