Opsin Expression in Human Epidermal Skin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Human skin is constantly exposed to solar light containing visible and ultraviolet radiation (UVR), a powerful skin carcinogen. UVR elicits cellular responses in epidermal cells via several mechanisms: direct absorption of short-wavelength UVR photons by DNA, oxidative damage caused by long-wavelength UVR, and, as we recently demonstrated, via a retinal-dependent G protein-coupled signaling pathway. Because the human epidermis is exposed to a wide range of light wavelengths, we investigated whether opsins, light-activated receptors that mediate photoreception in the eye, are expressed in epidermal skin to potentially serve as photosensors. Here we show that four opsins—OPN1-SW, OPN2, OPN3 and OPN5—are expressed in the two major human epidermal cell types, melanocytes and keratinocytes, and the mRNA expression profile of these opsins does not change in response to physiological UVR doses. We detected two OPN3 splice variants present in similar amounts in both cell types and three OPN5 splice isoforms, two of which encode truncated proteins. Notably, OPN2 and OPN3 mRNA were significantly more abundant than other opsins and encoded full-length proteins. Our results demonstrate that opsins are expressed in epidermal skin cells and suggest that they might initiate light-induced signaling pathways, possibly contributing to UVR phototransduction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".