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Stinging upside-down jellyfish may not be something you want to touch, but they could be used to make scaffolds for healing skin.

鈥淲e found that an abundant jellyfish species, Cassiopea andromeda, in the Gulf of Mexico is similar in structure to human skin,鈥� says Nayeli Rodr铆guez-Fuentes at the Scientific Research Center of Yucat谩n in Mexico, who led the work.

Natural and synthetic tissue scaffolds are used to repair skin, often after surgery or to heal burns. These allow new skin cells to be attached from the surgery patient or from a donor, so the more porous and similar to human skin that the scaffold material is, the better the cells are accepted and grow to regenerate tissue.

Collagen, the most abundant protein in mammals and the component responsible for skin鈥檚 stretchiness, is the standard choice for natural scaffold biomaterials. It is usually extracted from pigs and cows, but sources from the ocean, including jellyfish and octopuses, have been tested before.

Rodr铆guez-Fuentes鈥檚 team collected more than 100 upside-down jellyfish in waters off the north coast of the Yucat谩n peninsula and separated the non-stinging bell structures 鈥� usually the top side of more typical jellyfish species 鈥� from the animals鈥� bodies.

These jellyfish quickly bloom in their hundreds in warm waters, and are invasive in some areas. They could also be farmed, says Rodr铆guez-Fuentes, making them an attractive resource for healing skin without upsetting ecosystems.

Instead of extracting collagen from the jellyfish to make scaffolds, the researchers wanted to use the jellyfish tissue structure itself. To do this, they removed cells by freeze-drying the jellyfish bells in a salt solution and then bleached them with hydrogen peroxide. They were then dehydrated using alcohol, producing decellularised, sponge-like collagen structures.

After this process, the researchers were able to reliably produce scaffolds in which 70 per cent of the jellyfish DNA was removed. That is enough to successfully seed the remaining structures with human skin fibroblasts, cells in our bodies that generate connective tissue and repair injuries.

鈥淭his adds another unusual substrate to a wide range of materials that have been demonstrated for skin cell growth,鈥� says Sheila MacNeil, a tissue engineer at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her lab has shown that decellularised spinach also supports skin cells.

鈥淲ill jellyfish prove popular as a substrate for tissue engineering? Time will tell,鈥� she says.

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