You can now rely on this protein to keep your skin young

With the number of products that have come in the market, it's almost become impossible to not take care of your body, hair and skin. But it isn't always feasible to put so much money into buying such products and keeping yourself on a trial and error phase just to try on which product can work out for you. This is why, natural ways, remedies and ingredients are considered to be the safest option to stick to. If nothing, it'll keep us healthy if consumed in the right amount the right way. This is when we talk about the want to keep our skin young. Now, not many but most people would want a healthy young skin and would want to know of ways how to achieve it. Well, we've got good news for you. Scientists have found a one stop solution which comes in the form of a protein which promotes cell competition.

A new study says that the prosaically named COL17A1 heavily works around keeping the skin intact and unimpaired. The protein encourages cell competition where it drives out weaker cells and replicates them with stronger ones.

A professor at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University's Stem Cell Biology department who led the research, Emi Nishimura says, "Damaged or stressed stem cells can be selectively eliminated by intact stem cells every day in our skin."

But as you age, there's a depletion of COL17A1 which is as similar as UV radiation and other stress factors that affect your young skin. When this happens, the weaker cells replicate and leaves the skin thinner and more vulnerable to damage and also makes it slower to heal.

The research team then decided to find out if they could encourage the protein after it was depleted - effectively look for compounds which could begin the anti-ageing process inn skin - after they confirmed the importance of COL17A1.

The researchers detached two chemical compounds, Y27632 and apocynin, and tested them on skin cells which gave out positive results.

They point to ways of "facilitating skin regeneration and reducing skin ageing. Application of these drugs to full-thickness skin wounds significantly promoted wound repair," say the study.

These two chemical compounds could battle ageing and the researchers said that the research offered "proof-of-principle" as well. They even said, "Future studies are needed to determine the mechanisms of cell competition in other tissues, and to identify compounds capable of reversing ageing in other organs."

The research also gives legitimate evidence that healthy cells in mammals can repopulate adult tissues efficiently and replace unhealthy cells. The work can later lead to various products like tablet and creams which can stop skin damaging and promotes repair.

Says Nishimura that they're going to collaborate with cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies for the clinical use of chemicals.

A little more research will tell if the same process can work on other parts of the body which have epithelial cells like our skin does.