Literature Review Part (B): Overall Literature Review

Humans have a slow regeneration speed on their wound or damaged parts of the body especially the hepatocytes cell. Hepatocytes are the liver cells in the body which able to regenerate or restore 75% of the damaged liver cells. However, the regeneration process takes a relative long time period to heal up the wound. During the organ or cell transplantation, there are a few limitations such as availability of donor tissue and risk of rejection. Unlike starfish, starfish can regrow its arms/legs without finding donor or help from others. The regenerated arms/legs do not affect its biological movement mechanism [1]. The scientists say that the cells in starfish are different from humans which are having high healing capacity.

Hence, it is possible to study more about the regenerative process of starfish and apply into the medicine and surgery field. It helps to improve the healing capacity of humans and without worrying much on the risk of rejection. If humans able to heal the damaged cells by themselves, then disease such as AIDS, cancer cell or EBOLA could be cured in the future.

Starfish has a multi-layered self-organization mechanism that controlled by a layer of tube feet under its arms. The tube feet are able to sense obstacles and avoid them by moving its arms with muscle contraction and expansion. The tube feet movement is called as the self-organization of behavior which allows starfish to avoid danger situation and balancing. The tube feet transmit information to its central nervous system to produce coordinated behavior [2].

The multi-layered self-organization mechanism is introduced in the previous paragraph. It is possible to apply in health care which can protect our skin from any danger situation such as heat source, electric shock and etc. It is located at the outer surface of our skin and send the stimuli to our brain for instant reaction. It is extremely useful for workers who work at construction site or high risk places. It is a wild idea and still under research study, thus more information is needed to produce this product.

Reference:

[1] Rachel S.C. Friedman and Diane S. Krause. “Regeneration and Repair: New Finding in Stem Cell Research and Aging”. Longevity, Regeneration and Optimal Health, vol. 1172, pag. 88-94, Aug. 2009.

[2] M. Migita, E. Mizukami and Y. P. Gunji. “Flexibility in Starfish Behavior by Multi-Layered Mechanism of Self-Organization”. Biosystems, vol 82, issue 2, pag. 107-115, Nov. 2005.