Novel animal models for tracking the fate and contributions of bone marrow derived cells in diabetic healing.

There is a vast wealth of information to be gained by tracking both the fate and contribution of individual cell types to the wound healing response. This is particularly important in research focused on impaired healing, such as diabetic wound healing, where the number or function of one or more specific cell types may be abnormal and contribute to the observed healing derangements. Specifically, diabetic wounds have been shown to have an overactive inflammatory response and decreased angiogenesis. The ability to track specific cell types participating in these responses would dramatically improve our understanding of the cellular derangements in diabetic healing. In this chapter, we review two novel chimeric models based on the leptin deficient Db/Db mouse. The use of these models allows for the tracking of bone marrow derived inflammatory and progenitor cell populations as well as the determination of the molecular contributions of these cell populations to the wound healing response.