The examples shown here illustrate the power of gene targeting to the epidermis as a means of developing animal models for the study of human skin diseases. In this short review, I have focused on contributions which stem predominantly from my own laboratory [31, 32, 34, 37, 47]. However, other laboratories have also contributed heavily to the development of this technology [28-30, 35, 36]. The opportunities for these models are vast: there are a myriad of human skin diseases which have been characterized extensively at a biological level, but whose aetiology is presently unknown. A combined knowledge of (a) the biochemistry of epidermal differentiation; (b) epidermal-specific gene expression; and (c) transgenic mouse technology has provided the foundation for these and future studies in this area.
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Elaine Fuchs (1991) studied this question.