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Updated: Oct 12, 2025
Separation of Rat Epidermis and Dermis with Thermolysin to Detect Site-Specific Inflammatory mRNA and Protein
Published on: September 29, 2021
Noninvasive Tape-Stripping with High-Resolution RNA Profiling Effectively Captures a Preinflammatory State in
Lam C Tsoi1, Xianying Xing2, Enze Xing2
1Department of Dermatology, Michigan Medicine, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA; Department of Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics, Michigan Medicine, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA; Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA; Center for Statistical Genetics, School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
Abstract:
Tape stripping is a minimally invasive, nonscarring method that can be utilized to assess gene expression in the skin but is infrequently used given technical constraints. By comparing different tape stripping technologies and full-thickness skin biopsy results of lesional and nonlesional psoriatic skin from the same patients, we demonstrate that tape stripping with optimized high-resolution transcriptomic profiling can be used to effectively assess and characterize inflammatory responses in the skin. Upon comparison with single-cell RNA-sequencing data from psoriatic full-thickness skin biopsies, we illustrate that tape-stripping efficiently captures the transcriptome of the upper layers of the epidermis with sufficient resolution to assess the molecular components of the feed-forward immune amplification pathway in psoriasis. Notably, nonlesional psoriatic skin sampled by tape stripping demonstrates activated, proinflammatory changes when compared to healthy control skin, suggesting a prepsoriatic state, which is not captured on full-thickness skin biopsy transcriptome profiling. This work illustrates an approach to assess inflammatory response in the epidermis by combining noninvasive sampling with high throughput RNA-sequencing, providing a foundation for biomarker discoveries and mechanism of action studies for inflammatory skin conditions.
