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A new era in skin care: the omics revolution

It has been an amazing journey since Watson and Crick first identified the structure of DNA in the 1950s. Just 50 years later, in 2003, the entire human genome had been sequenced, heralding a new era of understanding and possibility. But this enormous achievement also highlighted the difficulty of interpretation and the complexity of how the code ultimately is expressed in the daily activities of a cell. Perhaps even more amazingly, as technology improved, sequencing capabilities reduced to hours what used to take years to accomplish. The sheer volume of data available became increasingly daunting to bring into clinical significance. In addition, it became clear that understanding the genome alone did not allow obvious extrapolation into the complex biology that occurred downstream from the gene: protein expression, protein modification and metabolic processes. The need for the complete picture subsequently engendered the development of new tools and even new fields. These were subsequently named proteomics, the evaluation of the actual proteins that are expressed in response to changes in gene activity, and metabolomics, the examination of how changes in genes and proteins affect biochemical processes and their end products. Collectively, genomics, proteomics and metabolomics are called omics. Interestingly, one could argue that some of our tools in proteomics and metabolomics predate the genomic era: the biggest difference in modern science is the scale and precision with which they can be evaluated as well as the dramatic ability to integrate all of this information across the biological system. While the emphasis of biomedical research in last 15 years in this area has largely been on understanding the mechanisms of disease and the effects of therapeutic intervention, it was clear from the start that there would be exciting ways to expand this understanding to the fundamental regulatory pathways that govern homeostasis in normal skin. The concept that skin care products modulate the function and qualities of the skin was demonstrated in early papers using early tests that demonstrated gene expression, such as keratins. This research clearly demonstrated that even seemingly normal skin is affected by changes that can be identified in the products of genetic transcriptional activity as the skin responds to an ever changing environment of temperature, humidity, pollution, physical and chemical stressors, ranging from ultraviolet radiation exposure to cleansing. Today, we have an enormous and rapidly growing body of research to inform our understanding of the skin’s normal and aberrant biologies. This supplement contains an introduction to the topic and then leads us on a journey through new and previously unpublished scientific insights into skin ageing and the mechanisms of how we may protect or reverse these changes. Then two papers detail some of the latest research in hair and how mutations affect both its structure and its proteins. Lastly, the final manuscripts detail the inflammatory milieu of seborrhoeic dermatitis and differences that can be detected on the omics level between male and female skin. Will some day this bounty of research take us to the holy grail of personalized skin care? Ironically, skin care is likely to be more complicated than some diseases because there are fewer cases where a single genetic derangement can be easily identified. Areas that have more precisely defined pathways, such as pigmentation, may be more straightforward, followed by intermediate issues such as skin ageing. In any event, it is clear and exciting that the use of these technologies will increase our understanding and change how we approach individuals and even populations in the care of their skin and hair over their lifetime.