Certain stem cells have a unique ability to move between growth compartments in hair follicles, but get stuck as people age and so lose their ability to mature and maintain hair color, a new study shows.
Led by researchers from NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the new work focused on cells in the skin of mice and also found in humans called melanocyte stem cells, or McSCs. Hair color is controlled by whether nonfunctional but continually multiplying pools of McSCs within hair follicles get the signal to become mature cells that make the protein pigments responsible for color.
Published in the journal Nature online April 19, the new study showed that McSCs are remarkably plastic. This means that during normal hair growth, such cells continually move back and forth on the maturity axis as they transit between compartments of the developing hair follicle. It is inside these compartments where McSCs are exposed to different levels of maturity-influencing protein signals.
Specifically, the research team found that McSCs transform between their most primitive stem cell state and the next stage of their maturation, the transit-amplifying state, and depending on their location.
The researchers found that as hair ages, sheds, and then repeatedly grows back, increasing numbers of McSCs get stuck in the stem cell compartment called the hair follicle bulge. There, they remain, do not mature into the transit-amplifying state, and do not travel back to their original location in the germ compartment, where WNT proteins would have prodded them to regenerate into pigment cells.
AR #74
The Age of a Sage
by John White
