Theory 40/Tissue/Regeneration
Regeneration Needs a Critical Blastema
The claim
Whether an appendage regenerates is set by the ratio of blastema size to body size, so small injuries in large animals fail to regenerate.
01Mechanism
Pattern formation requires enough cells to establish positional information; below a critical fraction of body size, the pattern cannot be specified.
02Prediction
Regeneration should fail below a size ratio.
03Refutation
Regeneration tracking injury type would remove the size term.