Despite being the organ with most surface area on the human body, scientists are still unlocking the secrets of human skin in 2024. And they seem to have made a pretty big breakthrough recently.
Skin is formed, hair follicles and all, in the womb when the rest of us is formed, and that environment is the only place skin can recover from damage without scarring.
But according to a new report in the scientific journal Nature, researchers have, for the first time, created a single cell atlas of prenatal human skin in a lab setting.
“With our prenatal human skin atlas, we’ve provided the first molecular ‘recipe’ for making human skin and uncovered how human hair follicles are formed before birth,” said Dr. Elena Winheim, co-first author from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, according to Good News Network.
Researchers utilized new developments in single cell sequencing and spatial transcriptomics as well as samples of prenatal skin tissue to help them study individual cells and learn new information about their makeup.
“We’re excited to have made a skin organoid model that grows hair. In this process, we uncovered a new, important role of immune cells in promoting the growth of blood vessels,” said Dr. Hudaa Gopee, co-first author from Newcastle University, according to Good News Network.
“Our findings could inform clinical advances to avoid scarring after surgery,” Gopee added.