Humans still retain all the genes necessary to have thick fur: evolution, however, has silenced them, as has happened to other hairless mammals such as dolphins and elephants.It has been demonstrated by a comparative genetic analysis of 62 animal species carried out in the United States by the Universities of Pittsburgh and Utah. The study, published in the journal eLife, has made possible the discovery of new genes linked to hair growth, which could become the target of therapies to recover hairs lost due to alopecia or chemotherapy.
To reconstruct how humans lost their fur, the researchers used computational methods to compare hundreds of regions of the genome simultaneously. In this case they examined over 19,000 genes andmore than 300,000 regulatory regions of the genome of 62 mammalian species, focusing on genes that evolved more rapidly in fur-free animals than in furry ones.
It turned out that hairless skin is a character that evolved independently on nine different occasions among mammals. It has done so for various reasons, like allowing better thermoregulation to elephants or greater swimming speed to dolphins, but always due to the accumulation of mutations in the same groups of genes, such as those that determine the production of keratin and regulate the development of the hair shaft.
The study also identified hundreds of new regulatory sequences in the genome and several genes that appear to be linked to hair and hair production and could become the target for new baldness therapies.
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