A new study from MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, England finds that skin injuries that happen at night heal more slowly than daytime wounds.

According to the study, Nighttime skin injuries heal about 60 percent slower than daytime skin injuries.

Our experimental results correlate with the observation that the time of injury significantly affects healing after burns in humans, with daytime wounds healing ~60% faster than nighttime wounds

Scientists suspect that the reason for this may lie in the circadian rhythms of the skin cells - which go into a bit of a lull at night

We suggest that circadian regulation of the cytoskeleton influences wound-healing efficacy from the cellular to the organismal scale.

Not only that, the time of the injury critically determines how fast the injury will heal.

"What we found is that how well you can heal depends on the time when you got injured, The speed of the healing depends on how fast certain cells can get to the wounded area in order to repair it, and that depends on their micro-architecture, which is controlled by the biological clock."" said Ned Hoyle, a lead molecular biology researcher at The Cambridge University

A fibroblast is a type of cell that synthesizes the extracellular matrix and collagen and a primary cellular protagonist of wound healing.

The researchers found that depending on the time of day, the rate at which the fibroblasts move up to the skin's surface varies - related to a protein called actin.

Actin is family of globular multi-functional proteins that form microfilaments. It is found in essentially all eukaryotic and forms an important part of the cytoskeleton — the supportive structure that gives the cell its shape. The shape of the actin proteins changes, When they are told to go to 'sleep' by their biological clock.

The team observed temporal coordination of actin regulators that drives cell-intrinsic rhythms in actin dynamics, therefore making the cellular clock modulates the efficiency of actin-dependent processes such as cell migration and adhesion, which ultimately affect the efficacy of wound healing.

It's still not yet clear exactly why the nighttime wounds take longer to heal, also, The researchers originally expected the fibroblasts to make up for lost ground during the day, but that doesn't happen.

Therefore healing time could be improved by resetting the cells’ clocks prior to surgery. Some drugs (like the steroid cortisol), can reset an individual cell’s body clock, so scheduling operations to keep in time with the patient's’ 24-hour “circadian rhythms” can critically improve healing time. Of course these are still just untested ideas.

Thanks for Reading .. @fancybrothers