Making wrinkles:A group of researchers has provided insights into the way the skin encloses to form gastrulating crinkles, an activity in every developing embryo that you may say counts among one of naturemapped wrinkles. It highlights processes not just pertaining to aging or regenerative therapies but also that might pertain to general processes like embryology.
Unraveling the Riddle of Wrinkles
While wrinkles come with the territory of aging skin, they are more than just a cosmetic issue. Even the brain, stomach and intestines among other organs, have their own set of wrinkles influences cellular states and differentiation that determine the physiological functions of each organ.
Dissecting the molecular basis of these biological wrinkle structures has proven difficult to address via in vivo models due to the complexity and limited recapitulation of these wrinkles ex-vivo. Now, a research team at POSTECH has developed an innovative approach that enables them to reconstruct such wrinkle structures in biological tissue without using animals.
The Cellular Secret of Wrinkles
Kangnam University (South Korea) researchers led by Professor Dong Sung Kim, Professor Anna Lee and Dr. Jaeseung Youn developed a full-thickness epithelial tissue model using only human epithelial cells and ECM materials. To test the model, they used a device that can be used to deliver specific forces and found that it does successfully recreate wrinkle features in vitro, which are seen more commonly in tissues like the gut or skin in their natural settings.
This discovery permitted the scientists to recreate a range of surface-wrinkling caffeneneither by mimicking the mechanical topographic deformation observed in individual large wrinkles subjected to uniaxial compressive loading or through distributed wrinkling under biaxial compression. Additionally, they found that the porous architecture of the underlying ECM, dehydration and compression of the epithelial layer play critical roles in this wrinkling process.
Conclusion
These results contribute to a mechanobiological perspective of how one could explain wrinkle formation, implicating an explicit mechanism in embryological studies as well as with broader implications for biomedical engineering, cosmetics and the like. Through identifying cellular mechanisms that create wrinkles, it also reveals new opportunities to associate wrinkles with the broader health and function of living organisms, and not only the cosmetic appearance.
