Skin Stem Cells

The skin stem cells are located at two distinct locations, the basement of epidermis and the hair follicle bulge. The bulge stem cell is considered to be of higher hierarchy in terms of the stemness than the epidermal stem cell. Recently, hair follicle bulge cells can be successfully isolated using fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) by labeling of a specific combination of surface antigens. In this chapter, we describe a standard method by which the bulge subset in the human follicle can be isolated for subsequent functional analyses.