Facilitator Questions

• How are skin stem cells used to treat burns victims? What are the limitations of this treatment and why?

• How did the Fuchs lab perform a pulse-chase experiment to identify where slowly-dividing stem cells reside in the epidermis?

• In the pulse-chase experiment performed by the Fuchs lab to identify label-retaining cells corresponding to multipotent hair follicle stem cells, why did the unipotent stem cells located in the basal layer of the epidermis not retain the GFP-histone label?

• How did the Fuchs lab show that the label retaining cells present in the hair follicle bulge were bona fide multipotent stem cells?

• What happens when stabilized ?-catenin is overexpressed in mouse hair follicles?

• What happens when ?-catenin is removed (knocked-out) from the mouse epidermis? Why do we need to make a conditional, inducible mouse to perform this experiment?