Salamander Stockings?

You can tell Christmas is around the corner when scientists produce pictures like these. But, while the images look like festive stockings, they're in fact the regenerating limb buds of axolotl, a type of salamander. They're also only about 2 mm in length, so they wouldn’t hold very many presents. The photos were taken using a sophisticated imaging technique called light sheet fluorescence microscopy, which provides high-resolution visualisation of molecules in 3D-preserved tissues. Here, the researchers have captured newly forming proteins (red, top pair), replicating DNA (green, left pair), transcribing RNA (green, right pair), and a type of protein modification (red, bottom pair). Salamanders are one of the few species of vertebrate that can regenerate body parts. And, while studies like these are unlikely to lead to medical efforts to regrow human limbs, they may inform strategies to improve wound healing in patients.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image adapted from work by Timothy J Duerr and colleagues
• Department of Biology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, October 2020