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University of California, Irvine-led researchers have discovered that a signaling molecule called SCUBE3 potently stimulates hair growth and may offer a therapeutic treatment for androgenetic alopecia, a common form of hair loss in both women and men.
The study, published online today in Developmental Cell, determined the precise mechanism by which the dermal papilla cells — specialized signal-making fibroblasts at the bottom of each hair follicle — promote new growth. Although it’s well known that dermal papilla cells play a pivotal role in controlling hair growth, the genetic basis of the activating molecules involved has been poorly understood.
“At different times during the hair follicle life cycle, the very same dermal papilla cells can send signals that either keep follicles dormant or trigger new hair growth,” said Maksim Plikus, Ph.D., UCI professor of developmental & cell biology and the study’s corresponding author. “We revealed that the SCUBE3 signaling molecule, which dermal papilla cells produce naturally, is the messenger used to ‘tell’ the neighboring hair stem cells to start dividing, which heralds the onset of new hair growth.”
The production of activating molecules by the dermal papilla cells is critical for efficient hair growth in mice and humans. In people with androgenetic alopecia, dermal papilla cells malfunction, greatly reducing the normally abundant activating molecules. A mouse model with hyperactivated dermal papilla cells and excessive hair, which will facilitate more discoveries about hair growth regulation, was developed for this research.
“Studying this mouse model permitted us to identify SCUBE3 as the previously unknown signaling molecule that can drive excessive hair growth,” said co-first author Yingzi Liu, a UCI postdoctoral researcher in developmental & cell biology.
Further tests validated that SCUBE3 activates hair growth in human follicles. Researchers microinjected SCUBE3 into mouse skin in which human scalp follicles had been transplanted, inducing new growth in both the dormant human and surrounding mouse follicles.
“These experiments provide proof-of-principle data that SCUBE3 or derived molecules can be a promising therapeutic for hair loss,” said co-first author Christian Guerrero-Juarez, a UCI postdoctoral researcher in mathematics.
Currently, there are two medications on the market — finasteride and minoxidil — that are approved by the Food and Drug Administration for androgenetic alopecia. Finasteride is only approved for use in men. Both drugs are not universally effective and need to be taken daily to maintain their clinical effect.
“There is a strong need for new, effective hair loss medicines, and naturally occurring compounds that are normally used by the dermal papilla cells present ideal next-generation candidates for treatment,” Plikus said. “Our test in the human hair transplant model validates the preclinical potential of SCUBE3.”
UCI has filed a provisional patent application on the use of SCUBE3 and its related molecular compounds for hair growth stimulation. Further research will be conducted in the Plikus lab and at Amplifica Holdings Group Inc., a biotechnology company co-founded by Plikus.
The study team included health professionals and academics from UCI, San Diego, China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.
This work was supported by LEO Foundation grants LF-AW-RAM-19-400008 and LF-OC-20-000611; Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant AN-0000000062; W.M. Keck Foundation grant WMKF-5634988; National Science Foundation grants DMS1951144 and DMS1763272; National Institutes of Health grants U01-AR073159, R01-AR079470, R01-AR079150, R21-AR078939 and P30-AR075047; Simons Foundation grant 594598; the National Natural Science Foundation of China; the NNSFC’s Major Research Plan training program; and Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology.

Why do two-thirds of in vitro fertilization (IVF) embryos go into developmental arrest? A new study publishing June 30 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Andrew Hutchins of Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China; Guoqing Tong of Shuguang Hospital in Shanghai, China; and colleagues shows that many embryos stored for IVF undergo characteristic genetic and metabolic changes that inhibit development. These results help explain the loss of developmental ability of many harvested embryos, and may point to strategies for increasing the proportion of developmentally competent embryos.
Only about 30% of IVF embryos progress as far as the blastocyst stage, the round ball of cells that begins to form the cell layers that will ultimately develop into tissues and organs. There have been multiple hypotheses to explain this arrest of development, but no single explanation has been fully supported by experiment. Animal models have offered only partial insights into the human situation because in many other species a much higher proportion of externally fertilized eggs succeed in developing.
To understand the inability of so many human embryos to progress, the authors examined gene expression in arrested embryos. They found that a proportion of embryos (dubbed Type 1) fail to make the transition from using stored maternal gene transcripts to activating the embryo’s own genome. This group was distinguished from two other groups (Types 2 and 3), in which this transition occurred successfully, but which displayed downregulation of multiple genes important for the dynamic events of early development. These notably included reduced activity of genes encoding nucleosomes (proteins that organize DNA) and ribosomes (molecular factories that synthesize proteins), as well as factors critical for regulating cell division.
Such changes are characteristic of cells that enter quiescence, a temporary state, and senescence, a permanent loss of dividing capacity. Embryos of both types 2 and 3 displayed low levels of glycolysis — a key energy-production set of reactions — but differed in the level of oxidative phosphorylation, another energy-producing system. When the authors treated these embryos with resveratrol, a small molecule that (among other effects) activates a set of metabolism-regulating enzymes, over half of the arrested embryos recommenced development, but fewer than 10% made it as far as the blastocyst stage.
“Our results indicate that many IVF embryos enter a senescent-like state,” Hutchins said, “in which changes in metabolism and gene expression prevent developmental progression. It appears to be possible to overcome this arrested state for some embryos, but much more work will be needed to determine the best strategy for doing so.”
Hutchins adds, “Human embryos are surprisingly difficult to grow in vitro, which is a major problem for the treatment of human fertility. Our study indicates that several biological processes are causing the arrest; including epigenetic and metabolic problems in the embryos.”
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In a recent article, Kessler Foundation scientists advocated for the incorporation of virtual reality (VR) technology in cognitive rehabilitation research in multiple sclerosis (MS). They presented a conceptual framework supporting VR as an adjuvant to traditional cognitive rehabilitation and exercise training for MS, theorizing that VR could strengthen the effects of traditional rehabilitative therapies by increasing sensory input and promoting multisensory integration and processing.
MS and exercise researchers Carly L.A. Wender, PhD, John DeLuca, PhD, and Brian M. Sandroff, PhD, authored the review, “Developing the rationale for including virtual reality in cognitive rehabilitation and exercise training approaches for managing cognitive dysfunction in MS,” which was published open access on April 3, 2022 by NeuroSci as part of the Special Issue Cognitive Impairment and Neuropsychiatric Dysfunctions in Multiple Sclerosis.
Current pharmacological therapies for MS are not effective for cognitive dysfunction, a common consequence of MS that affects the daily lives of many individuals. This lack of efficacy underscores the need to consider other approaches to managing these disabling cognitive deficits.
The inclusion of VR technology in rehabilitation research and care for MS has the potential not only to improve cognition but to facilitate the transfer of those cognitive gains to improvements in everyday function, according to Brian Sandroff, PhD, senior research scientist in the Center for Neuropsychology and Neuroscience Research at Kessler Foundation. “With VR, we can substantially increase engagement and the volume of sensory input,” he foresees. “And by promoting multisensory integration and processing, VR can augment the effects of the two most promising nonpharmacological treatments — cognitive rehabilitation and exercise.”
Virtual environments are flexible and varied, enabling investigators to control the range and progression of cognitive challenges, with the potential for greater adaptations and stronger intervention effects. VR also allows for the incorporation of cognitive rehabilitation strategies into exercise training sessions, which may support a more direct approach to improving specific cognitive domains through exercise prescriptions. The application of VR to stroke research has shown more improvement in motor outcomes compared with traditional therapy, as well as greater neural activation in the affected area of the brain, suggesting that greater gains may persist over time.
Dr. Sandroff emphasized the largely conceptual advantages for the use of VR to treat cognitive dysfunction in individuals with MS. “More clinical research is needed to explore the efficacy of combining VR with cognitive rehabilitation and/or exercise training, and the impact on everyday functioning on individual with MS,” Dr. Sandroff concluded. “The conceptual framework we outline includes examples of ways immersive and interactive VR can be incorporated into MS clinical trials that will form the basis for larger randomized clinical trials.”
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Researchers at New York University have created artificial Hox genes — which plan and direct where cells go to develop tissues or organs — using new synthetic DNA technology and genomic engineering in stem cells.
Their findings, published in Science, confirm how clusters of Hox genes help cells to learn and remember where they are in the body.
Hox genes as architects of the body
Nearly all animals — from humans to birds to fish — have an anterior-posterior axis, or a line that runs from head to tail. During development, Hox genes act as architects, determining the plan for where cells go along the axis, as well as what body parts they make up. Hox genes ensure that organs and tissues develop in the right place, forming the thorax or placing wings in the correct anatomical positions.
If Hox genes fail through misregulation or mutation, cells can get lost, playing a role in some cancers, birth defects, and miscarriages.
“I don’t think we can understand development or disease without understanding Hox genes,” said Esteban Mazzoni, associate professor of biology at NYU and the study’s co-senior author.

A Northwestern University-led team of researchers has developed a small, soft, flexible implant that relieves pain on demand and without the use of drugs. The first-of-its-kind device could provide a much-needed alternative to opioids and other highly addictive medications.
The biocompatible, water-soluble device works by softly wrapping around nerves to deliver precise, targeted cooling, which numbs nerves and blocks pain signals to the brain. An external pump enables the user to remotely activate the device and then increase or decrease its intensity. After the device is no longer needed, it naturally absorbs into the body — bypassing the need for surgical extraction.
The researchers believe the device has the potential to be most valuable for patients who undergo routine surgeries or even amputations that commonly require post-operative medications. Surgeons could implant the device during the procedure to help manage the patient’s post-operative pain.
The study will be published in the July 1 issue of the journal Science. The paper describes the device’s design and demonstrates its efficacy in an animal model.
“Although opioids are extremely effective, they also are extremely addictive,” said Northwestern’s John A. Rogers, who led the device’s development. “As engineers, we are motivated by the idea of treating pain without drugs — in ways that can be turned on and off instantly, with user control over the intensity of relief. The technology reported here exploits mechanisms that have some similarities to those that cause your fingers to feel numb when cold. Our implant allows that effect to be produced in a programmable way, directly and locally to targeted nerves, even those deep within surrounding soft tissues.”
A bioelectronics pioneer, Rogers is the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Neurological Surgery in the McCormick School of Engineeringand Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He also is the founding director of the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics. Jonathan Reeder, a former Ph.D. candidate in Rogers’ laboratory, is the paper’s first author.

Stress boosts a kind of sleep in mice that subsequently relieves anxiety, according to new research that also pinpoints the mechanism responsible.
Since sleep is similar across mammals, it is likely the same mechanism is triggered in human brains. Uncovering the mechanism could lead to artificial ways to boost its effects, helping to treat persistent stress disorders such as PTSD.
We often think of stress keeping us awake at night, but certain kinds of stress actually appear to induce sleep. Now, a study led by researchers at Imperial College London and institutions in China has uncovered how this happens in the brains of mice.
As well as discovering how sleep is induced, they reported that the sleep experienced by the mice appears to lower their anxiety levels the next day. The findings are reported today in the journal Science.
There are two main types of sleep that we, and all mammals experience: REM (rapid eye movement, where we tend to dream), and non-REM (NREM; deeper, dreamless sleep). People who suffer from PTSD experience less REM sleep, contributing to the theory that REM sleep helps us process difficult emotions and stress.
Lead researcher Professor Bill Wisden, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial, said: “Our results add weight to the idea that REM sleep helps us cope with stress. However, we previously only knew about ways REM sleep is reduced, such as some drugs that suppress it.

Published18 hours agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesIn a win for pro-choice activists, a Florida judge has blocked a state law banning abortions after 15 weeks.The controversial law signed in April by Governor Ron DeSantis, was set to go into effect tomorrow, and made no exceptions in cases of rape or incest.The decision comes amid a flurry of state legal battles following the US Supreme Court decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion.The state is expected to appeal to the Florida Supreme Court.Florida is one of 11 US states that protect abortion access in their own state constitutions.On Thursday, Leon County circuit judge John Cooper granted a temporary injunction to the law, which was legally challenged earlier in June by a coalition of pro-choice groups and clinics.His ruling blocking the law, however, will not be binding until a written order is signed by him – which he said would not happen immediately. The law is set to go into effect at midnight. Florida, the third most populous state in the US, had for over 40 years protected the right to abortion through a privacy amendment in the state’s constitution. In his ruling, the judge said that the law would violate those privacy protections. In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs argued that the state’s residents believe “that abortion is a fundamental right deserving of the strongest protection against government intrusion”.Inside a US abortion clinic on its last dayWhat happens now Roe v Wade has been overturned?The world reacts to US abortion ruling The lawsuit added that the 15-week law – which was modelled after the Mississippi law at the centre of the Supreme Court’s recent decision – represented a “brazen attempt to override the will of the Florida people”. After approving the bill in April, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that the law was intended to “protect babies in the womb who have beating hearts, who can move, who can taste, who can see and who can feel pain”.The law had been widely applauded by anti-abortion groups in the state, including the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops. According to data from the Centres of Disease Control, Florida has one of the highest rates of abortion in the US, behind only Illinois and New York. Polls also show that just over half of residents – 56% – believe abortions should be legal, making it the only state in the south-eastern US with a pro-choice majority. Governor DeSantis, however, has praised the recent Supreme Court ruling and vowed that Florida will work to restrict abortion access. “Florida will continue to defend its recently-enacted pro-life reforms against state court challenges, will work to expand pro-life protections and will stand for life by promoting adopting, foster care and child welfare,” he said in a statement last week. Judges in both Louisiana, Kentucky and Utah have already blocked trigger laws in those states. This video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.More on this storyUS ‘backsliding’ on women’s rights – health secretary1 day agoJudge blocks Louisiana’s abortion ‘trigger law’3 days agoUS retailers limit buying emergency contraceptives1 day agoHen parties get political in post-Roe Nashville3 days ago

Ever wondered if you have anything in common with an astronaut? Turns out there are 206 things — your bones. It’s these parts of our body that are the focus of a research study on bone loss in astronauts, and the important question of whether bone can be re-gained after returning to Earth.
The TBone study was started in 2015 by Dr. Steven Boyd, PhD, director of the McCaig Institute for Bone and Joint Health and professor in the Cumming School of Medicine. The study has followed 17 astronauts before and after spaceflight over the last seven years to understand whether bone recovers after ‘long-duration’ spaceflight. Findings are published in Scientific Reports, and while it might not seem like it matters to you here on Earth, the research is important to better understand bone health generally.
“Bone loss happens in humans — as we age, get injured, or any scenario where we can’t move the body, we lose bone,” says Dr. Leigh Gabel, PhD, assistant professor in Kinesiology, and lead author of the study.
“Understanding what happens to astronauts and how they recover is incredibly rare. It lets us look at the processes happening in the body in such a short time frame. We would have to follow someone for decades on Earth to see the same amount of bone loss,” Gabel says.
The researchers travelled to Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas to scan the wrists and ankles of the astronauts before they left for space, on their return to Earth, and then at six- and 12-months.
“We found that weight-bearing bones only partially recovered in most astronauts one year after spaceflight,” she says. “This suggests the permanent bone loss due to spaceflight is about the same as a decade worth of age-related bone loss on Earth.”
This loss happens because bones that would normally be weight-bearing on Earth, like your legs, don’t have to carry weight in microgravity — you just float.

An optical fiber as thin as a strand of hair holds promise for use in minimally invasive deep-tissue studies of patients’ brains that show the effects Alzheimer’s disease and other brain disorders. The research could set the stage for minimally invasive in vivo brain imaging in lab studies and monitoring neuronal activity over time in patients with neurological disorders.
“The ultrathin multimode fiber would easily fit into an acupuncture needle, and we know these needles can be inserted into anyone’s body with almost no pain, potentially enabling deep-tissue imaging in real time,” said co-author Benjamin Lochocki, from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
The challenge is efficiently increasing image resolution at the subcellular level, because loss of information is inevitable from light scrambling. In APL Photonics, published by AIP Publishing, researchers in the Netherlands address this challenge with speckle-based compressive imaging (SBCI) that exploits the light scrambling of multimode fibers to their advantage.
Optical fibers, a well-understood solution to guide light over long distances, have increasingly garnered attention in microendoscopy as a better way to access deep-lying tissue, due to their miniscule dimensions. They also eliminate the need for fluorescent labeling, a complicated and costly step.
Light scrambling is typically addressed via shaping the wavefront of an incident beam to reduce scattering and create a focused beam at the distal end of the fiber. However, this technique has limitations in acquisition speed and producing high-quality deep tissue images.
SBCI alters the laser beam entry position to create multiple and uncorrelated random speckle patterns at the fiber output. A computer algorithm can reconstruct an image of the object based on the pattern and its collected information.
This “compressive imaging” reduces the amount of pixel measurements needed to reconstruct an image of similar or better quality than the gold-standard raster imaging used in conventional endoscopes and microscopes. SBCI can produce high-resolution images up to 11 times faster, for a space three times as big, than the traditional raster-scan approach.
The technique was used to image lipofuscin, age-related fluorescent pigment that accumulates over time as metabolic waste in the soma, the part of neurons that contains the nucleus and is responsible for neurotransmitter production. Abnormal accumulation of lipofuscin might be associated with Alzheimer’s disease progression, although there is little understanding of this process.
The pigment buildup was visualized in a brain tissue sample of an Alzheimer’s patient donor obtained through the Netherlands Brain Bank.
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The adhesion of bacteria to host cells is always the first and one of the decisivesteps in the development of infectious diseases. The purpose of this adhesion by infectious pathogens is first to colonize the host organism (i.e., the human body), and then to trigger an infection, which in the worst case can end fatally. Precise understanding of the bacteria’s adhesion to host cells is a key to finding therapeutic alternatives that block this critical interaction in the earliest possible stage of an infection.
Critical interaction with the human protein fibronectin
In collaboration with other researchers, scientists from University Hospital Frankfurt and Goethe University Frankfurt have now explained the exact bacterial adhesion mechanism using the human-pathogenic bacterium Bartonella henselae. This pathogen causes “cat-scratch disease,” a disease transmitted from animals to humans. In an international collaborative project led by the Frankfurt research group headed by Professor Volkhard Kempf, the bacterial adhesion mechanism was deciphered with the help of a combination of in-vitro adhesion tests and high-throughput proteomics. Proteomics is the study of all the proteins present in a cell or a complex organism.
The scientists have shed light on a key mechanism: the bacterial adhesion to the host cells can be traced back to the interaction of a certain class of adhesins — called “trimeric autotransporter adhesins” — with fibronectin, a protein often found in human tissue. Adhesins are components on the surface of bacteria which enable the pathogen to adhere to the host’s biological structures. Homologues of the adhesin identified here as critical are also present in many other human-pathogenic bacteria, such as the multi-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, which the World Health Organization (WHO) has classified as the top priority for research into new antibiotics.
State-of-the-art protein analytics were used to visualize the exact points of interaction between the proteins. In addition, it was possible to show that experimental blocking of these processes almost entirely prevents bacterial adhesion. Therapeutic approaches that aim to prevent bacterial adhesion in this way could represent a promising treatment alternative as a new class of antibiotics (known as “anti-ligands”) in the constantly growing domain of multi-resistant bacteria.
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