Description
In an acute skin wound, newly released serum growth factors in the wound bed drive lateral migration of human keratinocytes (HKs) to re-epithelialize the wound. However, profiling the migration signal-specific genes has long been challenged by pleiotropic effects of a given growth factor, including proliferation, migration and factor-specific responses. To overcome these technical problems, we 1) took advantage of a unique response of HKs to transforming growth factor-beta (TGFbeta) to selectively suppress growth signal-responding genes and identify motility-specific genes and 2) employed dual stimulation of HKs with TGFalpha and insulin to identify the common genes and eliminate factor-specific genes. Under these conditions, DNA microarray analyses were utilized to study the profiles of both TGFalpha-regualted and insulin-regulated immediate early (IE, 30 min), early (E, 60 min) and delayed early (DE, 120 min) genes.