Establishing an ex vivo platform for molecular profiling of skin structural cells using frozen human skin biopsies

Frozen human skin biopsies can be cultured ex vivo on Transwell inserts to recover viable skin structural cells with cell-type-specific transcriptional profiles after prolonged culture.

• Why it matters: Existing 2D and 3D skin models often lack ex vivo preservation of native skin structure and cellular composition needed to study inflammatory reprogramming.
• What they did: The team used an air-liquid interface culture of cryopreserved biopsies and applied IFN-{gamma} to measure transcriptional and chromatin accessibility changes, plus secondary stimulation and histone-modifying enzyme inhibitors.
• The result: IFN-{gamma} triggered robust transcriptional and chromatin accessibility shifts that largely resolved after stimulus removal, and secondary responses were comparable to primary; histone-modifying inhibitors changed global histone marks without substantially altering transcriptional resolution.

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