Wounded skin and gut-lining cells pass electrical signals for hours

What happened

Writing about their newly published work in PNAS, Steve Granick and Sun-Min Yu describe experiments showing that when epithelial cells are wounded, they produce electrical signals that pass from cell to cell across dozens of cells and last for several hours. Epithelial tissue was not thought to signal electrically in this way. The authors' group reports that the voltage amplitudes are comparable to those seen in neurons.

Why it matters

If epithelia communicate injury electrically over long distances and times, wound healing may depend on an active signalling system as well as passive "wound currents". That could point to new ways to speed up or guide repair with electrical treatments.

Caveats

This entry is based on the authors' own article for a general audience. We have not yet independently confirmed the details against the full paper. The experiments were on cultured cells, and the effect has not yet been shown in living tissue.