Global profiling of human hair follicle scalp dermal papilla cells using Affymetrix microarrays

Dermal papilla cells isolated from the human hair follicle are capable of inducing hair growth in recipient epithelia. However, demonstrating disparity from rodent dermal papilla, human cells lose this inductive competance immediately upon growth in culture under normal growth conditions. We grew dermal papilla cells in hanging drop cultures that are morphologically akin to intact dermal papilla, and found that by enhancing the environment for aggregation, we could restore the inductive capacity of human dermal papilla cells in culture. The underlying genes that regulate the inductive potential of dermal papilla cells is not well understood, and we sought to use global profiling to identify key genes and pathways related to inductive competance within dermal papilla cells.

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Higgins CA, Chen JC, Cerise JE, Jahoda CA, Christiano AM