Unlike the vast majority of primates, Homo sapiens are “naked”, but why has fur in humans been lost? When did this mutation happen? These questions have long interested geneticists, and now a new study published eu eLifewent in search of the genetic basis of our body baldness and found that we actually still have the full set of genes needed for humans to have furbut these have been put on standby.
In search of the root of why human fur has shed, researchers on the new study conducted a first-of-its-kind analysis. examining the genetic codes of 62 mammals to see which segments of the genome appeared to be crucial for optimal smoothness.
In addition to flagging genes known to influence hair growth, the analysis identified new ones and hundreds of hair-related regulatory elements that influence gene expression.
Here, an animal’s phenotype can be influenced from epigenetics, which causes changes in an organism that are not directed by the DNA sequence itself, but by regulatory elements that act on its expression; that may explain why some animals may have the genes for a certain phenotypelike humans who have the genes for a whole body of hair, but instead they express a different oneor that of being in a certain sense, naked.
The genes and regulatory elements identified in the study code for all aspects of hair growth, from shaft shape to developmental pattern. able to identify genomic regions related to hair growth that had evolved at varying speeds, leading to potential explanations for how and when some mammals stopped having hair, and how fur in humans became a distant memory.
Is fur in humans the only phenomenon where this divergence has occurred?
In mammals there are varying degrees of hairlessness, and you might think humans are quite bald, until you look at the olive-smooth dolphins, to which we look like kiwis. When similar traits emerge along evolutionarily distinct groups like this, it is known as convergent evolution it is the process behind carcinizationthe obvious fact that the crab is the aspect of maximum performance.
Such convergent evolution may be driven by regulatory elements that turn off genes in disparate groups of animals, which is what the researchers were looking for when they conducted this study. Using a computational approach, they identified shared genes in mammals that evolved to be hairless and found that regions previously responsible for fur germination were accumulating mutations at different rates than their fuzzy relatives.
Mutation is a driver of evolution, meaning these areas could have been key in animals like humans losing their hair, and to think without them we might have had hairy dolphins.
Understanding why we stopped growing hair in certain places is interesting beyond laying bare all of our past, as it could also contribute to therapies to help people regrow the hair they want back, as is the case with male pattern baldness. .
As for whether your mate who appears to have retained body fur from our ancestors is ripe for scientific investigation, well, we’ll leave that to geneticists.
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