Participation of bone marrow derived cells in cutaneous wound healing

Bone marrow has long been known to be a source of stem cells capable of regeneration of the hematopoeitic system. Recent reports, however, have indicated that bone marrow might also contain early stem cells that can differentiate into other organ tissues such as skin. While these studies have illustrated that bone marrow stem cells could find their way to the skin, they have not addressed the dynamics of how bone marrow stem cells might participate in the homeostatis and regeneration of skin. In this report we followed green fluorescent protein (GFP) labeled bone marrow transplanted into non-GFP mice in order to determine the participation of bone marrow stem cells in cutaneous wounds. Our results indicate that there are a significant number of bone marrow cells that traffic through both wounded and non-wounded skin. Wounding stimulated the engraftment of bone marrow cells to the skin and induced bone marrow derived cells to incorporate into and differentiate into non-hematopoietic skin structures. This report thus illustrates that bone marrow might be a valuable source of stem cells for the skin and possibly other organs. Wounding could be a stimulus for bone marrow derived stem cells to travel to organs and aid in the regeneration of damaged tissue. (C) 2003 Wiley-Liss, Inc.