DNA duplication is essential for the repair of gastrointestinal perforation in the insect midgut

Invertebrate animals have the capacity of repairing wounds in the skin and gut via different mechanisms. Gastrointestinal perforation, a hole in the human gastrointestinal system, is a serious condition and surgery is necessary to repair the perforation to prevent an abdominal abscess or sepsis. Here we report the repair of gastrointestinal perforation made by a needle-puncture wound in the silkworm larval midgut. Following insect gut perforation, only a weak immune response was observed because the growth of Escherichia coli alone was partially inhibited by plasma collected at 6 h after needle puncture of the larval midgut. However, circulating hemocytes did aggregate over the needle-puncture wound to form a scab. While, cell division and apoptosis were not observed at the wound site, the needle puncture significantly enhanced DNA duplication in cells surrounding the wound, which was essential to repair the midgut perforation. Due to the repair capacity and limited immune response caused by needle puncture to the midgut, this approach was successfully used for the injection of small compounds (ethanol in this study) into the insect midgut. Consequently, this needle-puncture wounding of the insect gut can be developed for screening compounds for use as gut chemotherapeutics in the future.