This Jellyfish Can Heal Wounds in Minutes Without Scars and Scientists Think They’ve Found Its Secret
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A minor wound on a tiny jellyfish can close almost as you watch the cut happen. There’s no bleeding or scab. So, it’s no surprise there’s no scar either.
A decade ago, Jocelyn Malamy, an associate professor at the University of Chicago, observed jellyfish cells migrating to close a tissue gap for the very first time. These dime-sized medusae, belonging to the species Clytia hemisphaerica, can heal minor injuries in mere minutes and larger wounds in under an hour. According to Malamy, “healing in the jellyfish looks more like embryonic healing, which is scar-free”.
In a new study published in the journal Molecular Biology of the Cell, Mallamy and colleagues Maxwell Sassaman and Manjula P. hemisphaerica to unravel how these creatures achieve such remarkable recovery. By closely observing the jellyfish, the researchers identified a highly coordinated sequence of cellular events that drive tissue repair across varying scales.
In doing so, they may have found a biological blueprint that could eventually inform mammalian regenerative medicine. Clytia is a jellyfish, but not the kind most beachgoers picture. The familiar jellyfish form — the drifting, bell-shaped animal that pulses through the water — is only one stage of its life, known as the medusa.
The Clytia medusa is tiny, transparent and about the size of a dime. For much of its life, the animal exists instead as a colony of polyps: small, attached bodies that grow on rocks, docks or underwater leaves and later release baby jellyfish into the water. Because the animal lacks an immune system to trigger inflammation and possesses no capillaries, researchers can watch living epithelial cells stitch themselves together in real time.
By contrast, studying wound repair in mammals has been notoriously difficult. Complex blood vessel networks and immediate inflammatory responses often obscure the fundamental mechanics of cellular repair.
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