Investigation of the gene expression landscape of human skin wounds

Abstract: Wound healing is a complex physiological process. Effective wound healing enables the skin barrier function to be restored once the skin is injured. However, due to the complex nature of wounds, the mechanisms underlying tissue repair are still poorly understood. This has hindered the development of treatment for chronic wound, which is posing threat to both human health system and economy. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been identified as important gene expression regulators and to play functional roles in many biological processes.  The aim of this study was to unravel the gene regulatory network in human skin wound healing, in particular, to identify lncRNAs that may play a functional role in skin repair. Here we performed RNA sequencing to profile gene expression in fibroblasts and keratinocytes isolated from matched skin and day-7 acute wounds of five healthy donors. We predicted a total of 1974 and 3444 mRNA–lncRNA correlated pairs in wound fibroblasts and wound keratinocytes, respectively. By integrating the results from gene ontology enrichment and weighted co-expression network analysis, we shortlisted lncRNAs that may play a functional role in human skin wound healing.