Uncovering the mysteries of the skin with single-cell analysis
The skin is a highly heterogeneous tissue made of many layers and sublayers. It hosts numerous cell populations, including keratinocytes, melanocytes, fibroblasts, Langerhans’ and Merkel’s cells, macrophages, adipocytes, mast cells, Schwann cells, and stem cells.
The presence of cells that are not tissue-specific, such as immune cells or neural cells, makes skin tissue a melting pot of diverse cell populations. Moreover, skin tissue can vary across locations of the body – with different thicknesses and sublayers on soles and palms for example.
The skin is also host to a wide array of bodily functions such as temperature control, sensory perception, protection against light, and all kinds of pathogens, adding another layer of functional diversity at the single-cell level.
Asteria and Cytonaut have yielded an excellent and accurate reflection of this diversity in single-cell datasets on healthy skin tissue.
Enhancing understanding of skin diseases
The skin tissue is also affected by many diseases - some well-known and some that remain uncharacterized - that impact a large number of patients around the world, including psoriasis, dermatitis, acne, fungal or bacterial infections, and melanomas.
Elucidating the transcriptome of different cell types in diseased tissues can enhance understanding of disease pathology, in addition to providing crucial insights into novel therapeutic targets and diagnostics methods.
The modern notion of “exposome” in dermatology and cosmetology research – defined as the totality of exposures to which an individual is subjected to from conception to death – can also be applied to the skin.
Asteria and Cytonaut have played a pivotal role in these objectives, as demonstrated by the successful characterization of a previously undiagnosed skin disease by a team of researchers at the Saint-Louis Research Institute in Paris.
Case study: the discovery of inflammatory dermatosis
Researchers from the St. Louis Research Institute in Paris investigated a previously undiagnosed inflammatory skin disease in humans. To better understand the role of the immune system in the onset and progression of this disease, they used the Asteria kit to unveil interactions between keratinocytes and T-cells at the single-cell level.
With the high performance of the kit, they were able to identify the different subtypes of keratinocytes and the continuum of their differentiation from basal through spinous and up to the granular layers of the skin. To their delight, they even detected a small population of melanocytes, which are notoriously challenging to detect in single-cell studies.
As for immune cells, they were able to dive into the gene expression profiles of a large array of T-cells: CD3+/CD8+, CD3+/CD8-, natural killers, memory T cells, and cytotoxic T cells.
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