Reindeer Provide Insight into Mammalian Wound Healing

Get into the holiday spirit with this new paper out in Cell on reindeer!

Here, the authors investigated a curious observation in reindeer: the velvet on antlers can regenerate following injury, but skin wounds scar similar to in other mammals.

The authors set out to understand how and why the wound regeneration varies. They developed a single-cell atlas for reindeer: http://www.biernaskielab.ca/reindeer_atlas/ and performed a beautiful, mechanistic study of fibroblast-mediated immunology. The authors determined that inhibition of fibroblast inflammatory signals can enhance skin regeneration.

What are your thoughts on the paper? What other studies make interesting use of other mammalian systems to better understand human biology? Let's discuss!