Impact of ultraviolet radiation on dermal and epidermal DNA damage in a human pigmented bilayered skin substitute

Our laboratory has developed a scaffold-free cell-based method of tissue engineering to produce bilayered tissue-engineered skin substitutes (TESs) from epidermal and dermal cells. However, TES pigmentation is absent or heterogeneous after grafting, due to a suboptimal number of melanocytes in culture. Our objectives were to produce TESs with a sufficient quantity of melanocytes from different pigmentation phototypes (light and dark) to achieve...