title: What's water got to do with it? A nuclear magnetic resonance study of molecular motion in pig stratum corneum.
abstract: The 1H and 2H magnetic resonance signals from pig stratum corneum were measured as a function of hydration. The 1H free induction decay contained two components, one motionally restricted and the other isotropically mobile on the timescale of 10(-5) s. From its T2 decay, the mobile signal was further subdivided into two components; one, which was 11% of the signal and 5.5% of the mass of the dehydrated stratum corneum, was assigned to nonaqueous tissue (likely hydrocarbons) and the other to water. As water content increased from 0 to 0.25 gH2O/gSC, the second moment of the motionally restricted signal decreased from 5.4 x 10(9) to 3.6 x 10(9) s(-2), whereas the water T2 time increased from less than 0.3 ms to 3.3 ms. The 2H quadrupolar echo from stratum corneum hydrated in 2H2O had a signal from motionally restricted deuterons, attributed to deuterons exchanged onto O-H and N-H groups, and a mobile signal from 2H2O. The amount of exchange, 9.5% of the hydrogen sites in the motionally restricted fraction, was close to the number of exchangeable sites on keratin, the most abundant protein in stratum corneum. Our results are consistent with a model in which the bulk of the water interacts closely with the corneocytes in stratum corneum.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
authors.forename: I
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Vavasour
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Kitson
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: MacKay
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001834:Body Water / Q000737:chemistry / Q000378:metabolism* / Q000502:physiology; D003903:Deuterium; D004817:Epidermis / Q000378:metabolism*; D009682:Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy; D013552:Swine; D013556:Swine, Miniature
chemical_list: D003903:Deuterium