New Genome Sheds Light on the Axolotl, a Master of Regeneration

Wouldn’t it be sweet if you could regrow your arm after it’s been chopped off? Such is the life of a salamander, those adorable slimy four-legged amphibians that can regenerate limbs or even their spinal cords.

But salamanders are interesting for more reasons than their mad regeneration skillz. Especially when you consider the axolotl, a salamander that’s widely used as a model organism in biology. It’s got a ginormous genome that’s 32 billion base pairs long, which means every one of its