By Alicia Rohan
Hair’s graying can be caused by activation of the innate immune system, according to a new study from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The article, published in the open access journal PLOS Biology, highlights the negative effects of innate immune activation on hair pigmentation cells, called melanocytes, suggesting a connection between viral infection and hair’s graying.
“Our research looks primarily at how stem cells are affected by age,” said Melissa Harris, Ph.D., corresponding author and assistant professor in the UAB College of Arts and Sciences Department of Biology. “Using current genomic tools, we are able to look at the whole genome to gain a better understanding of which genes are expressed and when, and this allows us to better address the question of why we age the way we do. Hair-graying and melanocyte stem cells make up the models we use to study this process.”
Hair pigmentation over the course of a lifetime is dependent on the presence of melanocyte stem cells that reside in the hair follicle. As old hairs fall out and new hairs grow in, melanocyte stem cells serve as a reservoir for the melanocytes that produce the pigment that give hair its visible color. The loss of these stem cells leads to the growth of nonpigmented, or gray, hairs.“Evaluating mouse models of hair-graying using genomic tools can reveal key aspects of melanocyte stem cell biology,” Harris said. “Using this approach, we discovered a novel role for the melanogenesis-associated transcription factor, or MITF, in repressing the expression of innate immune genes within cells of the melanocyte lineage in mice.”
Please visit Alabama News Center for the Full Article
