Nerdy Science Blog

‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ is an awesome movie that shows a man, Benjamin Button, whose life starts from old to young.  I definitely recommend everyone to watch it at cinema.  However there might not be anyone who can be as special as Benjamin Button.

Maria Unna hereditary hypotrichosis (MUHH) is a disease identified and named after a German trichologist.  Hypotrichosis is a condition of having less than normal head or body hair.  MUHH is a rare inherited disease.  Patients with MUHH start losing hair during childhood.  There are six symptoms for MUHH patients, which are absent of eyebrows and eyelashes, loss of hair, poor nail growth, sparse armpit hair and pubic hair.  MUHH patients have sparse or no hair at birth.  The patients grow more hairy during childhood but start losing hair progressively at puberty.

Xue Zhang and colleagues from Peking Union Medical College, Beijing analyzed the genome of 19 Chinese families suffering MUHH.  They found a gene mutation, U2HR, on chromosome 8 is linked to MUHH.  U2HR is predicted to produce mini peptide that affects human hairless homolog (HR) that is crucial for hair follicles regeneration.  The finding is published on Nature Genetics last Sunday.

(journal [pic])

Mouse Factory in this post doesn’t refer to Mickey Mouse or Disney Land.

Besides parthenogenesis (the virgin-birth) of egg cells, another exciting news in biological recently is that researchers from Oregon Health & Science University has turned a mouse into some human liver cells manufacturing factory.

This not only change the way people change drugs, but also make things easier and cheaper for researchers to conduct their researches. Other than that, who knows your new liver will be a mouse-grown-human-liver, just kidding. If researchers manage to grow human liver on mouse, they can do the same on human too.

(picture source)