New UBC research shows for the first time that soil silicates—the most abundant material on the Earth’s crust—play a key role in blood clotting.
“Soil is not simply our matrix for growing food and for building materials. Here we discovered that soil can actually help control bleeding after injury by triggering clotting,” says the study’s senior author Dr. Christian Kastrup, associate professor in the faculty of medicine’s department of biochemistry and molecular biology and a scientist in UBC’s Michael Smith Laboratories and Centre for Blood Research.
The study, published today in Blood Advances, found that the presence of soil in wounds helps activate a blood protein, known as coagulation Factor XII. Once activated, the protein kicks off a rapid chain reaction that helps leads to the formation of a plug, sealing the wound and limiting blood loss.
While the researchers caution that there is a high risk of infection from unsterilized dirt, they say their findings may have implications for the future development of novel strategies using sterilized dirt to help manage bleeding and potentially understand infection after trauma.
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