Isolation of adult mouse stem keratinocytes using magnetic cell sorting (MACS)

The functional and molecular characterization of mouse epidermal stem cells (SC) requires in many circumstances arduous technologies and elaboration of complicated transgenic mouse models. To avoid these difficulties, we have developed a simplified protocol to obtain primary keratinocytes from adult mouse skin followed by magnetic-coupled isolation of the CD34 positive epidermal SC population. This approach provides a reproducible and useful method to obtain large amounts of viable cells in a quick and affordable manner, which allows the analysis of pathologies or mutant mice with reduced epidermal SC, and for the molecular and genomic analysis of this population.