Up the Volume

Every day, you shed skin. In a month, your entire skin has regenerated. This is thanks to stem cells that live at the bottom of your epidermis and journey upward through the layers of skin cells to reach the surface, transforming into mature skin cells as they go. During this process, their cell volume increases. Using engineered substrates, researchers investigated whether it's size changes that drive their fate. Previously, keratinocytes (the primary cell type in the epidermis) were found to mature when grown on a surface with small circular pillars (pictured here via scanning electron microscopy) but not with larger triangular shapes (which happened to cause volume reduction). Now, using different fluids to alter cell volume, it’s become clear that reducing volume prevents maturation on the circular pillar surface, while increasing it encourages maturation – even on triangular pillars. Cell volume changes are, therefore, key to skin cell development.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image from work by Sebastiaan Zijl and colleagues
• Centre for Gene Therapy and Regenerative Medicine, King's College London, Guy's Hospital, London, UK
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Journal of Cell Science, September 2025