The whole-mount staining of the normal tail epidermis of C57BL/6 mice is shown in Additional file 1: Fig. S2A and a schematic of the whole-mount view is shown in Fig. 1B. By using whole-mount tail epidermis staining, we observed the epidermis infiltration of CD8+ T cells on day 28 (Fig. 1C), and then CD8+ T cells migrated to the entire scale accompanied with melanocyte-specific elimination (Fig. 1D), indicating high concordance with the pathologies of human vitiligo and the feasibilities of translation studies and drug discovery efforts. Here, CD8A is linked to vitiligo.