Epidermal and dermal protein and enzymes: what's new

A detailed analysis and a systematical classification of the proteins synthesized in the various organs, along with their functions, their mechanism of action and their reciprocal interactions, have ever been an objective of the medical science, always looking for a better knowledge of the human body. But the research in this field has really developed only in the last decades, thanks to the concurrence of several factors: the discovery of new fundamental clonation and amplification techniques for genic sequences and derivative proteins, the exponential increase of the power of electronic calculators, the close collaboration between researchers of different disciplines (clinicians, chemists and biochemists, mathematicians, engineers). The effort in basic research has led to important practical results, like the comprehension of the molecular mechanisms that underlie several diseases, and, in some cases, the achievement of a proper therapy. The skin, main interface between the organism and the outside world, is a physical barrier: it needs, for this reason, a large set of structural proteins, capable of assuring elasticity and firmness, impermeability to micro-organisms and potentially noxious chemical agents and selective permeability to other substances, both exogenous and endogenous. But skin is not a inert barrier: it carries out its function also by mechanisms of active defense, aimed to eliminate potentially dangerous agents. These mechanisms require the synthesis of a wide spectrum of proteins, some acting directly (lytic enzymes), some as a part of intra- and intercellular metabolic processes that allow cells to achieve complex activities (like phagocytosis). Moreover, like all interface structures in biology (cell membranes, for example), the skin is used by the organism to acquire "information" from the external environment, useful for the activation of proper reactions. So, cutaneous cells have to be able to produce several proteins, fit for receiving "signals" of various kind from the environment, eventually elaborating them, and transducting them to the organism.