Thick Skinned

Compare the skin on the palm and back of your hand. Designed for unique purposes, they’re noticeably different. And skin on the soles of your feet is different again, thick and tough to face the rough road. But when people lose a limb through injury or disease, and have a stump that rests on a prosthetic leg, the skin that grows back is not thick like foot skin, so is unsuited to bearing weight and friction. Re-engineering tougher skin might make prosthetics more comfortable. A new study analysed what makes foot sole skin so strong, and found that beyond its thickness, it's also structured differently. For example there are denser bundles of collagen (yellow in foot sole skin, top, compared to body skin, bottom), a key structural protein. Details like this help build a full picture of this skin - the next challenge is applying that knowledge to patients.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Colin J. Boyle and colleagues
• Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, London, UK
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Science Advances, October 2019