Question

66. A 64-year-old woman, who has always been proud of her suntanned, healthy look, is referred to a dermatologist with a blue-violet, painless, 1.5-cm lump in the skin of her left shoulder. The lump is firm and cannot be moved, and has grown very rapidly over the past few weeks. The mass is removed surgically and the pathologist diagnoses it as a Merkel cell carcinoma. If the UV radiation to which her skin was exposed affected the Merkel cells, what other cell type sharing the same specific epidermal layer might also be affected

Answer 1

Basal stem cells for keratinocytes

Step-by-step explanation:

Keratinocytes are epidermal cells located in the outermost layer of the skin (i.e., the epidermis). Moreover, the cells located in the basal layer of the skin are known as basal keratinocytes or basal cells. These basal cells are proliferative cells that undergo differentiation in order to form suprabasal epidermal layers. Merkel cells are neuroendocrine cells that are located in the basal layer of the skin (scattered among basal keratinocytes), which are attached to surrounding keratinocytes by intercellular junctions called desmosomes.