Fight against the Baldness with the Cultured Follicles Method

Baldness is a natural process, along with the human aging process. But it could be a problem if an early baldness appears. For example, the British soccer star, Wayne Rooney even do hair transplant to cover his bald head to make it look cool.

Actually scientists have discovered a technique to grow hair on bald mice with a culturing hair follicles in the laboratory and plant in the animal skin. But the technique invented four decades ago it failed when applied to humans.

Now scientists are finding other ways in which the hair follicle tissue culture are expected to fight against the baldness. Angela Christiano, a geneticist from the University of Columbia, New York, and her colleague, Colin Jahoda, a cell expert at the University of Durham, England, whose curious the ability of mouse cells in the hair follicles developing. They then tried to breed human hair papilla cells using hanging-drop culture method.

Clusters of cultured cells from human hair follicles successfully produced new human hair when transplanted back into human skin. (Picture from: http://www.nature.com/)

Actually the techniques that used by Christiano and Jahoda has been known around for 100 years. Cells in a grain carrier medium placed hanging under the petri dish lid. The gravity causes all the cells forming the group at the end of grains with more natural three-dimensional configuration instead of letting them spread out in a flat dish. "This technique makes the cell to maintain its space and developing extracellular matrix. Accordingly, the cell could know when they can make a follicle," Christiano said.

At the time of cell culture results was implanted in the skin without hair on the backs of mice, there was an indication of follicular development. The results of this study published in this week issue of the PNAS journal. Christiano find facts to grow cells on a flat surface can interfere with the nearly 4,000 genes. *** [EKA | FROM VARIOUS SOURCES | NATURE | THE INDEPENDENT | GABRIEL TITIYOGA | KORAN TEMPO 4382]

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