Horse hair follicles: A novel dermal stem cell source for equine regenerative medicine

The easily accessible niche represented by skin and its appendages may serve as a promising source to complement modern regenerative medicine for horses. In humans and in animal models for human medicine, the hair follicle and its stem cell niches are well characterized. Since literature in this field of equine research is scarce, we sought to analyze cells of the dermal stem cell niche of the equine hair follicle morphologically and for a subset of markers useful for cell characterization via immunolabeling. We cultured equine forelock skin explants to obtain cultures with cells migrating from the hair follicles. Isolation of cells revealed typical fibroblast morphology with a strong tendency to aggregate and form spheroids. For immunofluorescent characterization of primary isolations, we tested an antibody panel consisting of lineage makers for the dermal compartment of the hair follicle, markers associated with an undifferentiated cell status and markers for epithelial cell types as negative controls. All antibodies used were also tested on equine skin sections. The isolated cells displayed clear profiles of dermal and undifferentiated cells. To substantiate our findings, we tested our primary isolations for established equine multipotent mesenchymal stromal cell antigen expression markers in flow cytometry experiments yielding strong convergence. The data presented here provide insights to a stem cell source in horses almost unnoticed to date. The basic investigations of the equine dermal hair follicle stem cell niche confirm the expression of standard markers used in other species and lay the foundation for future studies on this easily available adult stem cell source. © 2017 International Society for Advancement of Cytometry.