Skin Can Keep All of Its Collagen and Still Be Falling Apart, and a New Imaging Study Shows How

One property that reflects the organization is supramolecular chirality, the structural handedness or twist of the assembled molecules. Disorganized collagen does not. Tissue samples retained their bulk collagen content and coverage even after their underlying supramolecular chirality coherence had severely degraded. Whether topical retinoids, peptides, growth factors, energy devices or oral supplements affect supramolecular chirality is, at this point, entirely unknown. Skin tissue retained normal bulk collagen content and coverage even after the molecular organization, measured as supramolecular chirality, had severely degraded.