Profiling the Atopic Dermatitis Epidermal Transcriptome by Tape Stripping and BRB-seq

Abstract

Tape stripping is a non-invasive skin sampling technique, which has recently gained use for the study of the transcriptome of atopic dermatitis (AD), a common inflammatory skin disorder characterized by a defective epidermal barrier and perturbated immune response. Here, we performed BRB-seq—a low cost, multiplex-based, transcriptomic profiling technique—on tape-stripped skin from 30 AD patients and 30 healthy controls to evaluate the methods’ ability to assess the epidermal AD transcriptome. An AD signature consisting of 91 differentially expressed genes, specific for skin barrier and inflammatory response, was identified. The gene expression in the outermost layers, stratum corneum and stratum granulosum, of the skin showed highest correlation between tape-stripped skin and matched full-thickness punch biopsies. However, we observed that low and highly variable transcript counts, probably due to low RNA yield and RNA degradation in the tape-stripped skin samples, were a limiting factor for epidermal transcriptome profiling as compared to punch biopsies. We conclude that deep BRB-seq of tape-stripped skin is needed to counteract large between-sample RNA yield variation and highly zero-inflated data in order to apply this protocol for population-wide screening of the epidermal transcriptome in inflammatory skin diseases.

MicroRNA expression profiling of cutaneous squamous cell carcinomas and precursor lesions

“…Further development of our putative miRNA biomarker candidates is warranted to aid in clinical management of patients experiencing high AK load to determine the most appropriate treatment. This may be in the form of tape stripping 26…”

“…Further development of our putative miRNA biomarker candidates is warranted to aid in clinical management of patients experiencing high AK load to determine the most appropriate treatment. This may be in the form of tape stripping 26 or other micro‐sampling devices 27 which can collect nucleic acids and whole cells for biomarker assessment in a non‐invasive manner.…”

Atopic dermatitis and ocular allergy: common mechanisms and uncommon questions

“…This invasive sampling procedure has been a bottleneck for collecting large number of samples, particularly from pediatric patients. However, recent advances in noninvasive/ partially invasive skin sampling using skin tape strips have facilitated omics studies from multiple samples particularly where skin biopsies can be difficult to collect [58,59]. However, investigators have pointed put significant inter-variability between results, www.co-allergy.com potentially related to differences in sampling and analysis methodologies.…”