Sensing Wounds By Spilling Cellular Guts: Damage-Associated Protease Release Can Initiate Tissue Repair

Epithelia have an innate yet mysterious capacity to rapidly sense and respond to tissue damage. In this issue of Developmental Cell, O'Connor et al. exploit the genetics of Drosophila to reveal that protease release as a result of tissue injury activates insect cytokines to initiate immediate epithelial repair responses.