Jellyfish Regeneration: How Moon Jellyfish Put Themselves Back Together Again And May Inspire Self-Healing Biomaterials

Injured jellyfish have a remarkable way to self-repair themselves. Scientists have taken a closer look at jellyfish and have found that they actually reorganize their existing anatomy in order to regain symmetry after being injured.

Many marine animals, including some jellyfish, can rapidly regenerate tissues after an injury. For example, if a sea turtle takes a bite out of a jellyfish, the animal can quickly regrow new cells to replace the lost tissue.

In this case, the researchers took a closer look at the moon jellyfish to see it would respond in the same way a hydra would, which is often used as a model organism in regeneration studies. They focused their research on the jellyfish's juvenile stage due to its simple body plan: a disk-shaped body with eight symmetrical arms.

In order to simulate an injury, the researchers performed amputations on the jellyfish, producing animals with two, three, four, five, six or seven arms rather than the usual eight. They then returned the jellyfish to their usual habitat and monitored them.

The wounds healed up as expected, the tissue around the cut closing up in just a few hours. However, something unexpected also occurred; the jellyfish didn't regenerate tissue, but instead reorganized existing arms to be symmetrical and evenly spaced around the animal's disk-like body.

"This is a different strategy of self-repair," said Lea Goentoro, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Some animals just heal their wounds, other animals regenerate what is lost, but the moon jelly ephyrae don't regenerate their lost limbs. They heal the wound, but then they reorganize to regain symmetry."

This reorganization isn't wholly surprising, though. Radial symmetry is important in jellyfish. They move by flapping their "arms," which means that any asymmetry would cause their movements to be skewed.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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