Ever seen a chicken transform itself into a duck? The discovery of resear chers at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Cornell University Medical College, both in the US, seems to have done that. On injecting a mutant gene for bone morphogenetic protein (BMP, a growth factor involved in bone and cartilage formation) into the right legs of two- day-old chicken embryoes, the chicks developed webbed toes on their feet. This explains the mystery of cell demise in webs that join our digits inside the womb. Researchers say that we emerge without webbing because the cells in the webs die due to BMP ( Discover ,Vol 17, No 8).
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