Unraveling tissue repair immune responses in flies

Drosophila melanogaster has emerged as a powerful model to understand innate immune responses to infection (note the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine), and in recent years this system has begun to inform on the role and regulation of immune responses during tissue injury. Due to the speed and complexity of inflammation signals upon damage, a complete understanding of the immune responses during repair requires a combination of live imaging at high temporal resolution and genetic dissection, which is possible in a number of different injury models in the fly. Here we discuss the range of wound-induced immune responses that can be modeled in flies. These wound models have revealed the most immediate signals leading to immune cell activation, and highlighted a number of complex signaling cascades required for subsequent injury-associated inflammatory responses. What has emerged from this system are a host of both local acting signals, and surprisingly, more systemic tissue repair immune responses.