Hair follicles were created by modifying the skin cells of mice.
Murugesu is a journalist by the name of jason arunn.
It is the first time that mature hair follicles have been grown in a laboratory.
Kairbaan Hodivala-Dilke was not involved in the study. Different types of cells need different types of nutrition when they are outside of the body.
Hair follicles are produced in embryo as a result of interactions between skin cells and tissues.
Junji Fukuda and his colleagues studied hair follicle organoids to better understand these interactions.
The team was able to increase hair growth by controlling the organoids.
Growth factors, activators and inhibitors of signalling pathways are some of the conditions examined by Fukuda.
The team was able to reprogram mouse skin cells into hair follicle cells by culturing them in a special type of gel.
"If you think of a hair follicle, it has the hair down the middle of it and then there are layers of cells around the follicle and other specialized cells." She says that the gel allows the cells to grow in a way that they can climb over and around each other.
The hair grew for up to a month. The hair cycle of mice is about a month.
The experiment is being recreated using human cells.
One day hair loss could be treated with hair grown in a laboratory. She says it's possible to take hair from a person with lush hair and grow it in the lab and use their hair for a transplant. It can cause scarring if hair is moved from one part of the body to another.
The discovery isn't going to cure hair loss, but it lays the groundwork for someone to potentially do so.
Science Advances is a journal published by Science Advances.
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