| 1 week 3 days 9 hours ago Get the straight scoop on curly hair
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(NECN/ABC) - Curly or straight? Too much or too little? If you don’t like the hair you were born with, a scientific solution might be in the near future.
ABC’s Sunita Reed explains.
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Customers from far and wide come to Devachan Salon in New York to get the straight scoop on naturally curly hair.
Ana Paula Cota specializes in taming curly hair, but there's one kind that even she can't manage. Enter geneticist Angela Christiano. She and her colleagues studied people affected by a condition called "wooly hair." Under a microscope, splits can be seen throughout the hair fiber. That causes breakage and sometimes severe hair loss. Christiano wrote in the journal "Nature Genetics" that genetic analysis revealed a mutation in one gene.
Christiano says that because the gene affects a protein on the cell surface, it should be easy to create a drug that could be applied directly to the scalp or skin.
"And for the general public who either have too much hair or too little, probably for the first time, I think this gene gives us real hope that drugs can eventually be developed to manipulate hair growth one way or the other."
Christiano thinks that eventually, she can even develop a switch for curly or straight hair.
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