There is a wealth of evidence showing that for partial thickness injuries, significant improvements in healing can be achieved when an area of burned tissue is cooled for a period of time following an injury. Examining RNA effectively gives an insight into what genes have been switched on at any one point in time. It is a snap shot of activity that has just occurred. It has told us what genes were switched on and off by the burn and those affected by teh subsequent cooloing.

The first project has given us some vital clues but we need to get some more clues, some “eyes on the ground” and the future work in this project is designed to do this. We plan to use this initial wound model and investigate other methods of identifying the biological process that is occurring during the cooling process.