In his “Harvey Lecture” on wound repair, presented more than 30 years ago, Paul Weiss (1959) described kératinocyte migration this way:
[When] skin is injured, the bobbins of cells near the wound give up their hold, the binding layer becomes free, and the whole cell, deprived of its moorings, rolls and glides off in a sort of ameboid motion. Its migratory phase begins. This makes us ask at once, what actuates these cells to change from sedentary to migratory life?
Modem cell biology is on the verge of answering Weiss’s question. Recent studies have identified the adhesion systems that participate in ‘bobbins’ (i.e., hemidesmosomes) and the changes in adhesion receptors that can account for kératinocyte activation, that is, the transition of keratinocytes from a sedentary to migratory lifestyle. In this commentary, I will review some of the recent research on changes that occur during activation of normal keratinocytes to wound...
