A research group led by academic researcher Chika Okimura of Yamaguchi University Graduate School, in collaboration with a group of Musashino University and the University of Tokyo, discovered a unique competitive and cooperative behavior of cell populations involved in fish wound repair.

 For wounds (wounds), it is always desired to develop a treatment method because of pain, inconvenience of life, and cosmetic demands.Since wounds are healed by the natural healing power of the surrounding epithelial cells that move to the injured area and fill the wound, it is important to understand the migration mechanism of the cell population in order to develop an effective treatment method.On the other hand, wound healing in fish is 50 times faster than in humans.

 When one fish scale is adhered to the cover glass, epithelial cells called keratosite emerge from the scale and start pseudo-wound repair.At the head of the population, leader cells connect in a horizontal row via a protein (actomyosin) cable to pull follower cells.The size of individual cells does not change, and the population continues to expand in a semicircular shape.

 The research group considered this unknown population migration mechanism to be the key to rapid wound repair in fish, and elucidated a part of this homothety expansion mechanism.Leader cells connect each other with a cable to maintain the shape of the population, and in addition, the cable is cut by subsequent follower cells, and a new cable is connected to the follower cells to promote them to the leader, expanding the population. Was there.

 The research group likens this style to the rapid growth of employee-minded white companies, where hard-working leaders work together to pull in many followers and promote more and more talented followers to leaders.

 It is expected that such a mechanism will be applied to humans for medical purposes, and in the near future, wounds will be healed cleanly in a blink of an eye.

Paper information:[Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America] Leading edge elongation by follower cell interruption in advancing epithelial cell sheets

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