Assessment of Acute Wound Healing Using Excisional Mouse Tail Skin Wound Models

Area of Science:

• Regenerative Medicine
• Dermatology
• Translational Research

Background:

• Wound healing is a complex biological process crucial for restoring skin barrier function after injury.
• Chronic wounds, including diabetic foot and venous leg ulcers, affect millions, incurring significant healthcare costs and morbidity.
• Current in vivo models, like the back-punch excisional model, have limitations in mimicking human wound healing due to predominant contraction and reduced granulation tissue formation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a detailed and reproducible protocol for creating excisional wounds on mouse tails.
• To establish a model that overcomes the limitations of traditional wound healing models, promoting robust granulation and epithelialization.
• To optimize the mouse tail excisional model for downstream analyses, including histology, cryosectioning, and single-cell multi-omic studies.

Main Methods:

• Development and refinement of a standardized protocol for generating excisional wounds on the mouse tail.
• Characterization of wound healing dynamics, including granulation tissue formation and reepithelialization, in the tail model.
• Optimization of tissue processing for histological and cryosectioning analyses.
• Adaptation of the model for efficient single-cell isolation for multi-omic investigations.

Main Results:

• The mouse tail excisional model demonstrates robust granulation tissue formation and epithelial coverage, attributed to the "splinting" effect of the tail structure.
• This model provides a more physiologically relevant representation of wound healing compared to the back-punch model, which is dominated by contraction.
• The protocol is optimized for high-quality histological and cryosectioned samples, facilitating detailed cellular and molecular analysis.
• The model supports effective downstream cell isolation for advanced single-cell multi-omic analyses.

Conclusions:

• The mouse tail excisional wound model offers a superior alternative for studying wound healing mechanisms, particularly for chronic wound research.
• This reproducible protocol facilitates detailed investigation into the cellular and molecular regulators of skin repair.
• The model's suitability for histology, cryosectioning, and single-cell multi-omics enables comprehensive multi-level analyses of wound healing processes.