Our skin is the organ located at the interface with the outer world. It protects us from multiple aggressions by acting as a barrier. When damaged, our body is at risk for many problems by losing a first line of defense. Most of the time, the skin is able to repair itself and continue its role of protection. Skin regeneration happens in 4 major phases; hemostasis and coagulation, inflammation, proliferation and finally remodeling. Unfortunately, sometimes skin is damaged, and repair is very difficult with as example either a hypertrophic scarring or a chronic wound. During these 4 phases of skin repair, a multitude of biological factors plays a role, immune cells, cytokines, proteins and many others. In this work, we focused on miRNAs and more specifically on miRNAs selected in the literature, based on their potential involvement in tissue regeneration. This work is a first step in a larger potential project aimed at precisely characterizing the action of some miRNAs in skin repair.
We wondered whether exposing HaCat cells to burned wound exudates was a good model to study the expression level of miRNAs in these cells. For this, we exposed HaCat cells for 24 hours to burned wound exudates and we quantified the expression level of miRNA in the cells with RT-qPCR after total miRNA extraction.
For some candidate miRNAs we obtained concordant expression level changes with previous studies, and for others the expression level was not observable.
These results allow us to suggest that it might be interesting to use other cells such as primary keratinocytes to be closer to the skin and that high technical skills in laboratory techniques is needed to have more reliable results and draw more specific conclusions.