Towards a dermal papilla specific expression system in mice

Sammanfattning: Abstract Stem cells hold great promise for regenerative medicine. In order to realize the potential of stem cell-based therapies, it is highly required to understand the basic mechanisms of stem cell regulation and transform such knowledge into medical applications. However, understanding stem cell regulations is still challenging due to technical difficulties in studying stem cell biology. The hair follicle is a continuously regenerating mini-organ, in which keratinocyte and melanocyte stem cells cooperate to achieve periodical cycles of pigmented hair formation. The mouse hair follicle provides an ideal model by which to investigate molecular basis of stem cell regulation as defective molecular regulation results in abnormal hair formation, a phenotype easily recognized by appearance. It has been widely appreciated that the regulation of these stem cells is mediated through the epithelial-mesenchymal interactions where a cluster of mesenchymal cells, known as the dermal papilla, plays a key role. Here we aim to establish a system manipulating genes in dermal papilla to identify genes involved in the stem cell regulation. To this end, the purpose of this study is to identify a promoter element permitting stable and specific dermal papilla transgene expression in mice. In this report, by integrating BAC transgenesis and transposon-meditated gene delivery systems, we establish a simple pipeline to identify a gene expression element enabling dermal papilla-specific genetic modifications.