swft
Needs a life
Full throttle!
Posts: One MEEEEEELLION
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posted September 13, 2002 06:20 AM
Freek! You *gotta* get this!
Scientists create glowing green mice
Sept. 12 Mice whose fur glows green may be the first step to using gene therapy to treat hair loss, baldness and perhaps even to permanently change hair color, researchers say.
They put jellyfish genes into the hair follicles of the mice, which grew fur that glowed fluorescent green under the right light.
"The hair now is glowing green because green fluorescent protein is in the hair shaft," Robert Hoffman of San Diego-based AntiCancer, Inc., whose company led the study, said in a telephone interview.
"We saw lots of green fluorescent hair."
Writing in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hoffman and colleagues said their experiment involved skin taken from a mouse, treated, and then grafted to another mouse. They need to try it now directly on live mice.
"It's got a way to go before the market," said Hoffman, who worked with scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Japan's Kitasato University School of Medicine.
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But, he added: "We have a good system now to get genes into hair follicles."
Green fluorescent protein is often used by scientists testing genetic engineering techniques. It is a single gene that makes jellyfish glow green in the dark, is harmless to other animals and is easy to look for.
Hoffman said if one new gene functions in the hair follicle, others should.
His idea is to treat the hair loss that is caused by cancer chemotherapy. "You can imagine putting in genes that confer resistance to chemotherapy," he said.
Treating a receding hairline may be a bit more difficult, Hoffman said. "In male pattern baldness, the follicle makes a little fine hair instead of a normal hair shaft. This obviously involves a lot of genes."
Once the genes involved in color and graying are better understood, it may even be possible to use gene transfer as a cosmetic procedure, he said.
The system could also be used for more standard gene therapy, Hoffman said. He believes a hair follicle could be genetically engineered to make any kind of protein.
"Why can't it make insulin? Why can't it make interferon (an immune system protein)?" he asked.
"You've seen people with two yards of hair. That is all protein. That little hair follicle is a tremendous factory."
Scientists have tried to use gene therapy to change other cells in the body, notably muscle and liver cells, but Hoffman said hair follicles are easier to get to.
  
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your car is slow
Needs a job
Fuck Nitrous...Got Boost?
Posts: 4089
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posted September 13, 2002 07:13 AM
id like to see a picture of that 
____________
Do not taunt happy fun ball!
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zx12zx11
Expert Class
Posts: 471
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posted September 13, 2002 08:34 AM
I saw the same article on msnbc.com try looking there.
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frEEk
Administrator
ummm... yeah
Posts: 9660
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posted September 13, 2002 09:57 AM
nice!! i'v been wishing for something liek that for years! too cool. altho, i'd like it to be easy to change ur hair colour. if it's a one time thing & ur hair colour is gonna be the same shade permanently...i think i'd stick to dying it.
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deathpulse
Pro
Posts: 1688
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posted September 13, 2002 10:16 AM
WOW GREEN GLOWING HAIR WHILE I RIDE MY GREEN '12!!!! I NEED A CLEAR FULL FACE HELMET NEXT - WOOOHOOO!
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