Liver regeneration

In this ‘Snapshot’ article, we take a fresh look at the fundamentals of liver regeneration in light of recent technical innovations. While the mammalian response to partial hepatectomy (PH) has been studied for decades [1,2], in recent years the use of new experimental techniques has not only lead to a re-affirmation of basic principles of regeneration initially described by Nancy Bucher and others [3]; it also highlights remaining questions. PH leads to tightly synchronous rounds of replication, and given that the remaining liver is uninjured, it offers a physiological way to study both proliferative pathways in normal hepatocytes and abnormal regeneration in genetically modified mice.