Why is that the is liver the only organ in our body that can regrow, what makes it special?
In: Biology
Skin and bones are also organs (collections of tissues to perform functions) that regrow.
The liver regrows well because it is made of a pattern of hepatocytes (liver cells) and blood/bile vessels. This pattern repeats throughout the liver. If a portion of the liver is lost, the remaining liver replicates and repeats the pattern until the original liver capacity is restored.
This is a false premise. Many organs are capable of regrowing, and some, like the skin, are constantly being turned over. Generally speaking, organs capable of self-repair are organs that have very simple structures. Skin for example really only need to produce a constant supply of a single type of cell. The liver doesn’t need more than the cells themselves and the blood vessels (and the blood vessel formation mechanism is a one that automatically ‘detects’ a configuration that works, so it can run itself). Repairing things like kidney damage would require creating many different types of cells and appropriately connecting them to the complex layout of the existing kidney. That’s not something that kidney cells are able to do on their own.
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