“Activating” Adult Stem Cells, in Real Science Land
To coincide with that amusing pseudoscience advertisement, I just came across a new paper in Cell explaining how cyclosporine A can lead to excessive hair growth in patients. Apparently, by modulating calcium signaling in hair follicle stem cells, cyclosporine A can tip stem cells out of their quiescent state earlier than normal, leading to more cell division and thus more hair. Elaine Fuchs has been studying hair follicle stem cells as a model system for differentiation and development, and this is a really neat paper that ties those topics together with cell-cycle regulation via an interesting signaling system.
One amusing assay that they conduct on mice is to shave them or dye their hair to look at the rates of hair growth. It seems to be a pretty common assay in the hair-growth and baldness fields of research, but I haven’t seen it before, and the pictures are funny to look at (my apologies to those who are touchy about mouse humiliation):
