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The actual skin colour of different humans is affected by many substances, although the single most important substance determining human skin colour is the pigment melanin. Melanin is produced within the skin in cells called melanocytes and it is the main determinant of the skin colour of darker-skinned humans.
In humans, they constitute 90% of epidermal skin cells. [1] Basal cells in the basal layer ( stratum basale ) of the skin are sometimes referred to as basal keratinocytes . [ 2 ] Keratinocytes form a barrier against environmental damage by heat , UV radiation , water loss , pathogenic bacteria , fungi , parasites , and viruses .
The word skin originally only referred to dressed and tanned animal hide and the usual word for human skin was hide. Skin is a borrowing from Old Norse skinn "animal hide, fur", ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *sek-, meaning "to cut" (probably a reference to the fact that in those times animal hide was commonly cut off to be used as garment).
The skin is one of the largest organs of the body. In humans, it accounts for about 12 to 15 percent of total body weight and covers 1.5 to 2 m 2 of surface area. [1] 3D still showing human integumentary system. The skin (integument) is a composite organ, made up of at least two major layers of tissue: the epidermis and the dermis. [2]
The cells in the stratum granulosum do not divide, but instead form skin cells called keratinocytes from the granules of keratin. These skin cells finally become the cornified layer ( stratum corneum ), the outermost epidermal layer, where the cells become flattened sacks with their nuclei located at one end of the cell.
These stem cells develop into both keratinocyte precursors and melanoblasts - and these melanoblasts supply both hair and skin (moving into the basal layer of the epidermis). There is additionally evidence that melanocyte stem cells are present in cutaneous nerves, with nerve signals causing these cells to differentiate into melanocytes for the ...
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The Human Cell Atlas project, which started in 2016, had as one of its goals to "catalog all cell types (for example, immune cells or brain cells) and sub-types in the human body". [13] By 2018, the Human Cell Atlas description based the project on the assumption that "our characterization of the hundreds of types and subtypes of cells in the ...