And if the human body could heal itself like a lizard that regenerates its tail, Chinese scientists are getting closer to achieving it and in a surprising experiment, they reactivated in mice an ancestral genetic code that seemed to have been lost during evolution and with that they managed to make the mice regenerate complex tissues that they normally could not.

The key to all this, an old acquaintance of biology, retinoic acid, the study compared healing in mice and rabbits after causing damage to their ears, both formed a blasphemous, a group of stem cells that indicate the beginning of regeneration, but while the rabbits advanced in healing, the mice stagnated, the explanation the gene AH1A2, which in rabbits is activated after an injury, produces retinoic acid in sufficient quantity to initiate regeneration.

In mice, this gene barely works and retinoic acid degrades quickly, so the team decided to directly inject the substance and nervous mice and it worked, but they went further, in one step the scientists inserted into the mice a fragment of rabbit DNA near the ALDH1A2 gene, with that, the mice began to produce retinoic acid naturally and managed to regenerate the entire auricular structure with skin, vessels, cartilage and more blood.

This technique of borrowing genetic elements from species with high regenerative power represents a new approach in genetic engineering. The manipulation proved to be safe in the context studied, with functional regeneration and without uncontrolled tissue growth.

Although the process does not involve AI directly, the study was supported by biological prediction models and computational analysis of genetic data, technologies that are increasingly used to map pathways of gene expression and predict effects of interventions.

The impact goes far beyond mouse ears. Retinoic acid is already approved by the FDA for medical use and its application in tissue regeneration opens doors for areas such as plastic surgery, the treatment of traumatic wounds and even organ regeneration.

In the future, the combination of intelligent algorithms with genetic engineering could accelerate the discovery of regenerative pathways in humans, something that is still surrounded by limitations today.