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New insights into wound healing: Using 3D mapping, researchers uncover a process that has stymied mechanobiology:

When we get a wound on our skin, the cells in our bodies quickly mobilize to repair it. While it has been known how cells heal wounds and how scars form, a team led by researchers from Washington University in St. Louis has determined for the first time how the process begins, which may provide new insight into wound healing, fibrosis and cancer metastasis.

"Clinical efforts to prevent the progression of fibrocontractile diseases, such as scarring and fibrosis, have been largely unsuccessful, in part because the mechanisms that cells use to interact with the protein fibers around them are unclear," [Delaram] Shakiba said. "We found that fibroblasts use completely different mechanisms in the early -- and I think the most treatable -- stages of these interactions, and that their responses to drugs can therefore be the opposite of what they would be in the later stages."

[...] The researchers learned they could control the cell shape in two ways: First, by controlling the boundaries around it, and second, by inhibiting or upregulating particular proteins involved in the remodeling of the collagen.

Fibroblasts pull the edges of a wound together, causing it to contract or close up. Collagen in the cells then remodels the extracellular matrix to fully close the wound. This is where mechanobiology comes into play.

"There's a balance between tension and compression inside a cell that is newly exposed to fibrous proteins," [professor Guy] Genin said. "There is tension in actin cables, and by playing with that balance, we can make these protrusions grow extremely long," Genin said. "We can stop the remodeling from occurring or we can increase it."

Journal Reference:
Delaram Shakiba, Farid Alisafaei, Alireza Savadipour, et al. The Balance between Actomyosin Contractility and Microtubule Polymerization Regulates Hierarchical Protrusions That Govern Efficient Fibroblast–Collagen Interactions, ACS Nano (DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.9b09941)

Original Submission