Tip the Scales

Oof! Papercut. When you damage your skin, you sever the dense network of nerve fibres in your biggest organ. These nerves sense pain, temperature, and itching, which helps keep you safe. When these fibres snap, your body breaks them down, producing cellular debris that must be cleared for new nerve fibres to grow. Despite the importance of this process, we haven't understood its mechanisms – until now. By plucking scales from zebrafish skin and following the repair process in living animals, scientists have uncovered the cellular details of this cleanup operation. Here, we see immune cells called Langerhans cells (blue) hoovering up nerve fibre debris (pink). This new role for Langerhans cells was completely unknown and has important clinical implications. Previous research has found that nerve damage disorders caused by diabetes and cancer chemotherapy are linked to changes in the number of skin Langerhans cells – targeting them could lead to new treatments.

Written by Henry Stennett

Henry Stennett

Writer

Henry is a science communicator at Cancer Research UK and a freelance writer. He used to research microbiology but now he’s got the writing bug.

• Video from work by Eric Peterman and colleagues
• Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Disease Models & Mechanisms, April 2023