Scientists find skin cells ‘scream’ for help when hurt

As science continues to advance further with each day, scientists keep making new and exciting discoveries, including that our skin ‘screams’ for help when injured even though the scientific community has long believed that skin and other epithelial cells were silent.

Indeed, these cells form barrier tissues that protect our body’s interior from the outside world and scientists didn’t think they would need to communicate with each other like neurons do, so researchers were shocked to discover the reality, per a report by Scientific American on June 12.

How exactly skin cells ‘scream’

Specifically, skin cells, when wounded, emit a slow electric pulse in a way that resembles neuron firing. According to Sun-Min Yu, an engineer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and lead author of the study, this ‘cry for help’ may summon other cells to help rebuild the damaged spots:

“The epithelial cells are making a signal kind of like a scream: ‘We got injured, we need repair, you need to come over here.’”

Despite the deep-seated understanding that epithelial cells coordinate healing by passing chemical signals to their neighbors, Yu “thought maybe there should be a faster signaling pathway.” With this in mind, she cultured epithelial skin cells from humans and kidney cells from dogs in dishes attached to electrodes.

Then, she used a laser to injure the cells and detected some electrical ‘noise’ coming from locations near the lesions. As she explained, “It was a very evident, active signal,” that had much in common with a neuron’s self-generated electrical spikes.

That said, these bursts were quicker than chemical messengers but a lot slower than the neuron signals and traveled across a minimum of a dozen other epithelial cells. 

The researchers haven’t yet managed to uncover how these cells produced the signals, but they did discover they could fire only in the presence of calcium ions. As it happens, neurons rely on ions too, including calcium, sodium, and potassium, for signaling, and the ions’ electrical charge provides their signature voltage spike.

Elsewhere, an earlier study has exposed the surprising behaviors of the so-called ‘zombie’ or senescent skin cells, which outlive their usefulness without ever quite dying, including helping the immune system heal wounds (although they typically cause inflammation and promote diseases).