Fragmented Healing

An infection settling into a wound is like being kicked when you’re down. Infections make a bad situation worse, with microorganisms capitalising on a rare opportunity to slip past our protective skin, delaying healing and potentially leading to more serious problems. A new study aiming to characterise infected wounds in order to better predict and prevent them analysed the proteins found at healing and infected wound sites. During infection, bacteria provide their own protein-degrading enzymes which act alongside the body’s, so the resulting mix of protein fragments (peptides) is different. Analysing this mass of protein rubble revealed 150 peptides unique to infected wounds (pictured, with Staphylococcus aureus bacteria coloured yellow) and 90 found only in healing wounds, including some with antimicrobial properties. The researchers suggest that checking the protein fragments in wounds might help monitor healing, spot infection before symptoms show, and prevent bacteria rubbing salt in the wound.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image by Mariena van der Plas and Matthias Mörgelin
• Division of Dermatology and Venereology, Department of Clinical Sciences, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, July 2021