Remove Hofstenia miamia's tail and it will grow another. Remove its head and another one, including everything from a mouth to the brain, will grow in its place. Cut the worm in three separate pieces and within eight weeks there'll be three fully formed worms. Their power of regeneration makes them a prime research subject for scientists. Now, a team of researchers is taking the study of these worms to the next level by making them transgenic.

In a new study published November 8 in Developmental Cell researchers led by Professor Mansi Srivastava in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, developed a method to make transgenic panther worms to study how the regeneration process works through transgenesis.

Transgenesis is when scientists introduce something into the genome of an organism that is not normally part of that genome. "It's a tool that biologists use to study how cells or tissues work within the body of an animal," Srivastava said.

Srivastava and co-author Lorenzo Ricci, former postdoctoral fellow in Srivastava's lab, injected modified DNA into embryos that have just been fertilized. That DNA and its modifications then gets incorporated in the genome of the cells as they divide. When the worm matures it will be glowing. The process takes approximately eight weeks, but the payoff is much longer because that glow will be passed along to its children and their children.