Worms Reveal Secrets of Wound Healing Response

The lowly and simple roundworm may be the ideal laboratory model to learn more about the complex processes involved in repairing wounds and could eventually allow scientists to improve the body's response to healing skin wounds, a serious problem in diabetics and the elderly. That's the conclusion of biologists at the University of California, San Diego who have discovered genes in the laboratory roundworm C. elegans that signal the presence of surface wounds and trigger another series of chemical reactions that allow the worms to quickly close cuts in their surfaces that would turn fatal if left unrepaired. The scientists report in the December 6 issue of the journal Current Biology that these two findings and a third discovery they made in the worms, involving genes that inhibit wound healing, could allow scientists one day to design ways to improve the healing of cuts and sores by possibly blocking the action of these inhibitory genes or finding ways to enhance the chemical signaling and wound healing process. An advance copy of their paper is being published online this week by the journal. "What we've shown in this paper is that a biochemical pathway is activated by wounding in the worms that involves calcium," said Andrew Chisholm, a professor of biology at UC San Diego, who headed the research effort. "It's been known for some time that one of the things that happens when you damage a cell is that calcium levels within the cell increase." But in a series of experiments with C. elegans, Chisholm and postdoctoral fellow Suhong Xu found out much more.