To grow or not to grow: How do planarian flatworms know they have reached the right size?

Hanh Vu

The ability of multicellular organisms to coordinate the growth of individual organs with the size of the entire body, and to stop growing at the right size, is essential for generating adults with body sizes and proportions that maximize fitness under changing environmental conditions. Despite its importance, little is known about how organisms assess their size and orchestrate cellular behaviors, such as proliferation, differentiation, and cell death, to ensure robust homeostatic cell turnover and allometric growth. In this talk, I will present our ongoing work to uncover the control logic of organismal growth by combining theoretical modeling with experimental validation using the planarian flatworm Schmidtea mediterranea, a powerful model system with remarkable adult body size plasticity and regenerative capacity.