Today, during the 39th annual meeting of the American Association for Dental Research, convening in Washington, D.C., lead researcher C. Millan of the U.S. Army Dental Corps in Martinez, Ga., will present a poster of a study titled, "A Novel In Vitro Model for Light-Induced Wound Healing."
Studies have suggested that exposure to minimal doses of blue-violet light (400-500 nm) elicits production of small amounts of reactive oxygen species (ROS), and contributes to increased mitochondrial activity and cell growth in epithelial cells. Many growth factor signaling pathways generate ROS.
In this study, Millan and other researchers involved in this study hypothesize that exposure to blue-violet light may enhance cell growth. To test this hypothesis, they developed a novel in-vitro wound healing model that allowed them to monitor the cellular responses to a single, small dose of light in cultured cells.
Normal human epidermal keratinocytes (NHEK) and human gingival fibroblasts (HGF) were plated around cloning cylinders. At confluency, the cylinders were removed to create a wound. Cells were treated with a single 5 J/cm2 light dose delivered by a quartz-tungsten-halogen light source. Mitochondrial succinate dehydrogenase activity was measured via a standard MTT assay, and cell proliferation was assessed using DRAQ5 DNA dye. Conditioned media were collected at each time point and used in a growth factor antibody array (RayBio®) to compare the secretion products.
