The following is an excerpt.
Doctors could one day use nail stem cells to treat malformed nails or even amputated limbs, Mayumi Ito of New York University Langone Medical Center suggests.
Ito and her colleagues traced the fates of cells on the back feet of mice during nail growth and found a population of stem cells that produces the hard part of the nail and the soft tissue underneath. When the researchers cut off the end of a toe, signals from the regrowing nail stimulated the tissue underneath to form new bone, the authors report June 12 in Nature.
Read the full story here: Nail-generating tissue also regrows fingertips