Molecular Markers of UV Exposure and Cancer Risk in Skin

The goal of this laboratory study is to test the feasibility of non-invasively sampling normal human skin using a novel mixture of surfactants to extract DNA from superficial epidermal cells, and then using this sampling method to test the feasibility of applying genomics to DNA adducts induced by ultraviolet radiation (UV) at genome sites ultrasensitive to UV, and their resulting somatic mutations, in order to predict a person's risk of future skin cancer.