Identification of the Human Dermal Fibroblast Stem Cell

Cutaneous fibroblasts are critical for skin homeostasis and recovery following wounding. Recent work has highlighted that fibroblasts are a highly heterogenous cell type, comprised of multipledistinct subpopulations which vary in their functional biology and physiology. Knowledge of cell surface markers specific to distinct fibroblast subpopulation scan help to develop drugs able to selectively target specific fibroblasts involved in repair and dermal tissue regeneration. To date, much of the progress towards delineating fibroblast heterogeneity has been made with mice; identification of analogous human dermal fibroblast subpopulations has been limited by the lack of effective in vivo model of human skin but now emerging high-definition transcriptomic techniques offer new avenues for delineating distinct human cellular identities. This thesis presents a novel human skin xenograft model and uses state-of-the-art single cell transcriptomic technology to identify and characterize the human dermal fibroblast stem/progenitor cell (hFSC)as well as propose its putative downstream progeny dermal fibroblast subpopulations.