One-step simple isolation method to obtain both epidermal and dermal stem cells from human skin specimen

Abstract

Stem cells play a crucial role in maintaining and repairing tissues during homeostasis and following injury. The efficient procurement of high quantity and quality of skin stem cells is important for both laboratory studies and clinical applications. Here, we describe a one-step isolation procedure to efficiently obtain both epidermal and dermal cell population from human skin specimen, based on the different influence of the Rho kinase inhibitor Y27632 on the growth of epidermal and dermal cells during the initial culture. Compared with the conventional methods, our protocol shows that it is simpler and less time consuming and can efficiently obtain the high quality of skin stem cells and can maintain the stem cell features after culture expansion.