GET ready to bin those peroxide dyes and blue-rinse tints. Genetically modified hair in all shades and colours is coming to a salon near you, although you may be a bit greyer by the time it arrives.
Researchers have turned the hair of lab mice a striking shade of fluorescent green. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e punk mice, you could say,鈥� says creator Ronald Hoffman. It will be some years before GM hair makes it into the salons. But the pioneering experiments raise the prospect of restoring colour to greying hair, and could herald future treatments for baldness.
Hoffman鈥檚 team at biotech company AntiCancer in San Diego, California, created the mice by inserting a jellyfish gene into the animals鈥� hair follicles. The gene makes a protein that glows green when bathed in blue light.
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To insert the gene, the team first incorporated it into an adenovirus similar to the one that causes colds. They also plucked out genes that enable the virus to replicate, so that it would load its genetic cargo into mouse cells without infecting the rest of the animal. They then grew small sheets of mouse skin, softened them with an enzyme called collagenase, and dunked the skin into a solution containing the gene-laden virus.
Within hours, Hoffman was able to peer down a microscope and see blobs of the fluorescent green protein appearing in hair follicles, the source of each new shaft of hair (see Graphic). In the slivers he had treated, 80 per cent of the growing hairs had turned green. When he grafted the slivers onto mice lacking hair of their own, the transplanted hair continued developing normally in every way (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.192453799)
Hoffman warns that the breakthrough is very much a first step. Before we can treat baldness the same way, we will have to identify the genes that cause it. But it may one day be possible to insert genes into hair follicles which suppress the overproduction of the hormone dihydrotestosterone, which is suspected of causing male pattern baldness.
Using the GM technology to alter our usual hair colour might be easier, however. Hair colour is governed by the amount and form of the pigment melanin. People with black hair make a form of the pigment called eumelanin, while ginger and brown hair owe their hue to a lighter form, called pheomelanin. Hoffman suggests that a simple hair cream could be used to switch the genes that control these pigments on or off.
But if your ambition is to become a natural blonde, prepare for a disappointment, as no one yet knows the molecular secret of blonde hair. 鈥淚t鈥檚 one thing to restore pigment formation to a greying follicle, but quite another to modify the pigment,鈥� says Hoffman.
He now plans to experiment with albino mice, to see if it is possible to insert the missing tyrosinase gene which produces the melanin pigments.