Isolation and Culture of Human Skin Mast Cells

Mast cells are intriguing immune cells monitoring the interfaces of our body with the environment. Long-term cultures of mast cells originating from hematological malignant cells have been traditionally used to investigate mast cell biology, but these cells are not optimal to study the characteristics of human skin mast cells because of their origin and also due to the changes caused by long-term culture. To overcome these limitations, freshly isolated mast cells from human skin have been recently introduced as a research tool and provide a better resource for studies investigating the properties of mast cells in the human skin. Here, the isolation procedure of human skin mast cells from skin to cell culture is explained in detail and clarified in several figures.