The transcription factor p63 plays a pivotal role in keratinocyte proliferation and differentiation in the epidermis. However, how p63 regulates epidermal genes during differentiation is not yet clear. Using epigenome profiling of differentiating human primary epidermal keratinocytes, we characterized a catalog of dynamically regulated genes and p63-bound regulatory elements that are relevant f...

The skin contains two known subpopulations of stem cells/epidermal progenitors: a basal keratinocyte population found in the interfollicular epithelium and cells residing in the bulge region of the hair follicle. The major role of the interfollicular basal keratinocyte population may be epidermal renewal, whereas the bulge population may only be activated and recruited to form a cutaneous epith...

BACKGROUND Cell position rather than cell lineage governs most aspects of development in plants. However, the nature and the origin of positional information remains elusive. Animal epidermal patterning relies in many cases on positional information provided by cell-cell communication. The epidermal layer of the Arabidopsis root is made of alternating files of two cell types and thus presents a...

The spatial distribution of plant stomata is a model system to study epidermal cell pattern formation. Molecular genetic approaches have identified several key genes required for stomatal distribution patterning, but environmental conditions that perturb the stomatal spacing distribution have not yet been identified. We found that immersing hydroponic cultures in 1-5% sucrose solution induced a...

Krox20, a zinc finger-containing transcription factor, is well known for mediating stem and progenitor cell activation differentiation in variety of tissues. In recent study, we reported the first time population epithelial-derived Krox20-expressing keratinocytes hair follicle that ultimately terminally differentiate to form structural component shaft. These Krox20-lineage cells also mediate me...

Stomata are pores in the plant epidermis that control carbon dioxide uptake and water loss. They are major regulators of global carbon and water cycles [1]. Several signaling components that regulate stomatal development have been characterized. These include a putative secretory peptide EPF1, LRR receptor components TMM and ER, and a peptidase SDD1 [2-4]. We have identified EPF2, a peptide rel...

Chromatin landscape and regulatory networks are determinant in cell lineage specification differentiation. We generated profiles of expression signature (RNA-Seq), chromatin accessibility (ATAC-Seq), architecture (Hi-C), histone modifications (ChIP-Seq) neonate epidermis vivo to define the modules governing murine skin observed that 80% differentially regulated genes repressed differentiated ep...

A recent publication in The EMBO Journal (Bardot et al, 2013) provides novel insights into lineage specification during the development of the mouse skin. Ezhkova and colleagues demonstrate that Ezh1 and Ezh2, core enzymes of the Polycomb Repressive Complex (PRC), restrict differentiation of Merkel cells, a specialized population of mechanosensory cells by directly repressing the cell fate dete...