As the very front barrier to protect biological body from external environments, skin is the most frequently injured organ. Cutaneous wound healing is a dynamic, intricate and well-organized process that involves various cells types and cellular processes. Recently, a potential healing-promoting peptide, AH90, was indentified from the frog skin of Odorrana grahami by the research team of Prof. LAI Ren (Kunming Institute of Zoology, CAS).
“Because wound healing is an evolutionarily conserved process, and meanwhile, frog and mammalian skin share the same evolutionary ancestry, AH90 might be considered as an excellent template for the future development of novel wound-healing agents”, according to Prof. LAI.
The classic model of wound healing is comprised of four highly sequential and overlapping phases, hemostasis, inflammation, proliferation and tissue remodeling. Upon injury to the skin, a set of complex biochemical events takes place in a closely orchestrated cascade to repair the damage and during which, transforming growth factor β1 (TGF-β1) plays a key role.
Prof. LAI’s team has long been focusing on the bioactive peptides of amphibians. Among the many bioactive peptides isolated from the skin of O. grahami, AH90 was stood out due to its excellent wound healing-promoting ability both in vivo and in vitro. Moreover, it is also the first wound healing-promoting peptide associate with TGF-β1 releasing ability ever found from frog skin.
In this study, AH90 has been shown with a strong capacity to promote cell migration and accelerate the wound healing process of a murine model with full thickness dermal wound, including re-epithelialization and granulation tissue contraction. Meanwhile, their results indicated that these healing-promoting effects were induced via AH90 activated TGF-β and its downstream signal pathways.
These findings may facilitate our understanding of effective factors involved in the wound repair process and the details are available from The International Journal of Biochemistry and Cell Biology (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1357272514000193).
(By Su-Qing Liu)
