Federal Republic of Germany

Summary: We analyzed the distribution of fibronectin i routinely embedded tissue specimens from 53 skin wounds and 6 postmortem wounds. In postmortem wounds a faint but focal positive staining was exclusively found at the margin of the specimens which dit not extend into the adjacent stroma. Vital wounds were classified into 3 groups. The first comprising lesions with wound ages ranging from a few seconds to 30min, the second com-prising those with wound ages upt to 3 weeks, and the third group with lesions more than 3 weeks old. Ten out of 17 lesions with a wound age up to 30 rain showed a clear positive reaction within the wound area. Three specimens in this group were completely negative, while in 4 additional cases the result was not significantly dif-ferent from postmortem lesions. These 7 Cases were char