No skin off your back: the sampling and extraction of sebum for metabolomics

ConclusionSebum has a huge potential beyond skin research and understanding how one ’s physiological state affects or reflects on the skin metabolome via the sebaceous glands itself or by interactions with sebaceous secretion, will open doors for simpler biomonitoring. Sebum acts as a sink to environmental metabolites and has applications awaiting to be explored, such as biosecur ity, cross-border migration, localised exposure to harmful substances, and high-throughput population screening. These applications will be possible with rapid advances in volatile headspace and lipidomics method development as well as the ability of the metabolomics community to annotate unknown sp ecies better. A key issue with skin surface analysis that remains unsolved is attributing the source of the metabolites found on the skin surface before meaningful biological interpretation.
Source: Metabolomics - Category: Biology Source Type: research