Human genetics - Hair apparent

Treatments for baldness usually involve rubbing lotions onto the surface of the scalp. But one group is now making headway towards a more scientific cure by homing in on the root cause -- one of the genes that is responsible for baldness. By studying seven members of a Pakistani family with a recessively inherited form of baldness known as alopecia universalis, the authors identified a region on the short arm of chromosome 8 that is often mutated. They narrowed this down even further by cloning the human homologue of the mousehairlessgene, which turned out to map to this exact region. This is the first documented genetic mutation to be associated exclusively with hair loss.