Multiphoton microscopy for skin wound healing study in terms of cellular metabolism and collagen regeneration

Abstract

Multiphoton microscopy was employed to study normal skin wound healing in live rats noninvasively. Wound healing is a process involving series of biochemical events. This study evaluates the regeneration of collagen and change in cellular metabolic activity during wound healing in rats, with second harmonic generation (SHG) and fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM), respectively. In eukaryotic cells ATP is the molecule that holds the energy for cellular functioning. Whereas NADH is an electron donor in the metabolic pathways, required to generate ATP. Fluorescence lifetime of NADH free to protein bound ratio was evaluated to determine the relative metabolic activity. The FLIM data were acquired by a TCSPC system using SPCM software and analyzed by SPCImage software. Additionally, polarization resolved SHG signals were also collected to observe the changes in optical birefringence and hence the anisotropy of regenerated collagens from rat wound biopsy samples. Mat lab programming was used to process the data to construct the anisotropy images. Results indicated that, cells involved in healing had higher metabolic activity during the first week of healing, which decreases gradually and become equivalent to normal skin upon healing completes. A net degradation of collagen during the inflammatory phase and net regeneration starting from day 5 were observed in terms of SHG signal intensity change. Polarization resolved SHG imaging of the wound biopsy sample indicates higher value of anisotropy in proliferative phase, from day 4th to 8th, of wound formation; however the anisotropy decreases upon healing.