FIGURE 1.

Clinical and molecular analyses of chronic wounds and wound healing complications (WHCs). (A) Classification of chronic wounds was based on ulcer type and anatomical location of the donor. WHC resections were derived from complications of surgical wounds. Intact skin samples were taken from plastic surgeries on patients without chronic wounds and served as controls. Wound resections were collected by the treating physician from patients undergoing debridement surgery. The photographs shown include examples of 1, foot ulcer (FU); 2, leg ulcer (LU); 3, pressure ulcer (PU); 4, WHC; 5, intact skin. The schematic on the right indicates the colour code used to differentiate wound subregions and intact skin specimen evaluated in this study. Light‐blue, brown, and red indicate peri‐wound, wound border and wound bed subregions, respectively, of ulcers and WHCs; grey indicates intact skin. Peri‐wound denotes the transition zone between the wound border and surrounding intact skin, wound border the region adjacent to the wound bed, and wound bed the center of the wound that is devoid of the epidermis. Star symbols in the respective colours denote the different wound subregions which are based on visual inspection of the wound specimen, as exemplified for the PU sample. Scale bars correspond to 1 cm (about 0.39 in) length. (B) Tissue sectioning and sub‐sectioning, schematic representation. Full trans‐sectional tissue sections were formalin‐fixed and embedded in paraffin prior to (a) Haematoxylin and eosin (HE) and IHC analysis (including qIHC). Adjacent, non‐fixed sections were divided into subsections according to wound architecture for (b) gene expression analyses by RNA‐Seq in individual wound subregions; similarly sized intact skin subsections served as controls. (C) Histopathology. HE‐stained sections from wound and intact skin specimen, numbering and star symbols as in A. Scale bars correspond to 2.5 mm (about 0.1 in) length.