撰文播音 克里斯多佛•因塔利亚塔（Christopher Intagliata）

翻译 许楠

审校 张清越

Certain proteins that coordinate the healing response are present at higher levels in oral tissue—meaning wounds in the mouth fix faster. Christopher Intagliata reports.

在口腔组织中，有些调控恢复反应的蛋白质水平更高——说明口腔修复的速度会更快。

When you burn your tongue or cut your cheek, the pain can be intense. But the wound heals pretty quickly, compared to injuries elsewhere.

在你烫伤舌头或划伤脸颊时，伤口会伴有剧烈的疼痛。但是这些部位的伤口恢复起来会比其他部位快得多。

That’s because all the factors needed to repair a wound are ready to jump into action in oral tissue—and a new study shows that proteins called transcription factors, which control all those healing elements, are present at greater levels in the mouth.

这是因为所有恢复伤口所需的要素，都已经在口腔组织中待命准备随时出动了——一项新的研究表明，叫做转录因子的蛋白在口腔中的含量非常高，它可以控制所有损伤恢复的要素。

You can think of those controlling proteins as theater directors…and the healing factors as the actors, waiting in the wings. "They are ready to go, right on the sidelines, in the oral epithelia, so the director says come ahead and then they are just right onstage." Maria Morasso, a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health.

你可以把那些控制蛋白质的因子想象成剧院导演……而愈合因子则是在剧场旁静候的演员。玛利亚·莫拉索（Maria Morasso）是美国国立卫生研究院的高级研究员，她说：“他们已经准备好了，就在场边（口腔上皮）候着。当导演说上台时，他们就立刻来到台上。” 

She says that's not the case in regular skin tissue. "The actors are in their room or in their house. They have the capability of coming on stage. But they're nowhere close, so you have to go through that step of getting them onstage to go ahead with that function."

她还提到在普通的皮肤组织中，情况不是这样的。“演员们在房间或者家里。它们有登上舞台的能力，但是这之间有一定的距离。所以必须要在通过所有邀请它们上台的步骤之后，它们才能发挥作用。

Which delays healing. "It might be difficult to have the play finish on time and according to the script." The study is in the journal Science Translational Medicine. [Ramiro Iglesias-Bartolome et al., Transcriptional signature primes human oral mucosa for rapid wound healing]

这就会拉长恢复时间。“要按照剧本按时完成可能会有困难。”这项研究发表在《科学变医学》（Science Translational Medicine）杂志上[Ramiro Iglesias-Bartolome et al., Transcriptional signature primes human oral mucosa for rapid wound healing]。

Morasso and her colleagues also tested this idea by genetically engineering mice to have more of those factors, the 'directors', in their regular skin tissue—and sure enough, those mice had significantly faster skin wound healing than did control mice.

莫拉索团队还通过基因工程，令老鼠的常规皮肤组织中拥有更多恢复因子，也就是“导演”——当然，这些老鼠的皮肤伤口愈合速度也明显快于对照组。

But we can't genetically engineer humans. Instead, Morasso says, if we can learn more about who the healing 'actors' are… and perhaps we can find targeted ways of sending those individuals onstage…to deliver a better performance for patients.

但我们不能改造人类的基因。莫拉索说，如果我们能更好地了解治疗“演员”是谁，也许我们就可以找到有针对性的方式，把它们送到台上，为病人提供更好的帮助。