查看文章

Currently, the standard for treatment of full-thickness skin wounds is skin grafts or bioengineered skin substitutes; however, this method is limited by the amount of intact donor skin and lack of follicles and architecture. Thus, a protocol is needed for the expansion and differentiation of adult epidermal and hair follicle stem cells for use in scaffold mediated tissue engineering. Recently, we developed a transgenic porcine model in which H2B-GFP is under the control of the LGR5 promoter. LGR5 is an established marker of stem cells, meaning this model can be used to track the development and behaviour of these cells. The focus of this project was to create a novel culture method for the maintenance and expansion of LGR5+ epidermal adult stem cells utilising the green fluorescent protein (GFP) tag. Single cell epidermal stem cells were isolated from porcine skin using dispase II (10 mg mL−1; Sigma) and trypsin (0 …