( If you're a cat fancier you're well aw...)Hirsute Or Hairless? Two Proteins May Spell The Difference

If you're a cat fancier, you're well aware that hair follicles are expendable. The product of a spontaneous mutation that caught a cat breeder's eye, le chat nu, would quickly succumb in the wild—its winter coat consists of little more than a ridge of fur down the midback and tail—and needs special care to thrive as a pet. Hairless animals in the lab, on the other hand, can be very instructive. Understanding how hair develops sheds light on the fundamental processes that generate a wide range of tissues and organs, including the lungs, cornea, and mammary glands.

How complex, three-dimensional structures emerge from single sheets of cells is a fundamental question in developmental biology. The dispensability of hair follicles makes them the perfect model system for studying this question—specifically, how structures and organs develop from buds. In a new study, Elaine Fuchs and colleagues use a three-pronged approach—involving gene expression analysis, transgenic mice, and cell cultures—to study how epithelial buds, the precursors of hair follicles, form. Their experiments point to two key actors in a signaling pathway that molds a targeted cluster of cells into a hair bud.

During the budding process, overlapping signaling pathways from two adjacent embryonic cell layers—the epithelium and the mesenchyme—direct morphogenesis. The mesenchymal cells initiate the cell-to-cell “crosstalk?that controls bud formation by first directing a small cluster of epithelial cells to form a placode, the pouch that forms hair plugs. The placode in turn directs underlying mesenchymal cells to form the base of the hair follicle, called the dermal papilla, and both structures contribute to the mature hair follicle. During development, cells are constantly bombarded with external signals. The trick is figuring out which signals trigger the transcriptional and behavioral properties in cells that spur bud formation.

In previous experiments, Fuchs and colleagues show
'"/>

Source:PLoS

Page: 1 2 3
Related biology news :

1. UF Researchers Map Bacterial Proteins That Cause Tooth Loss
2. Proteins stop blood-vessel and tumor growth in mice
3. Proteins spur diabetic mice models to grow blood vessels, nerves
4. Parallel evolution: Proteins do it, too
5. Proteins as parents
6. Proteins anchor memories in our brain
7. Proteins may behave differently in natural environments
8. Proteins necessary for brain development found to be critical for long-term memory
9. Proteins may predict lung transplant rejection
10. Proteins important in Alzheimers, Parkinsons disease travel in the slow lane
11. Spelling out cancer on the nanoscale