Conservation and restoration of fur objects made from keratin, which is also the protein that makes up skin, feathers, nails, hooves, claws, and horns. "The way I think a lot of people understand fur versus hair is in the density of follicles," says Ross McPhee, Curator of the Department of Mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History. "So for fur-bearing animals—which were converted into coats and so-forth—people always wanted it to be something that was very dense, so there’s the idea therefore that fur is dense, and it certainly is in [the] kinds of fur-bearers that we use for this purpose. Whereas hair is not
Hair cell mice bred to be missing the gene grow more hair cells than control mice that have the gene. Additionally, the sonic hedgehog protein has been shown to block activity of the retinoblastoma protein, thereby inducing cell cycle re-entry and the regrowth of new cells. The cell cycle inhibitor p27kip1 (CDKN1B) has also been found to encourage regrowth of cochlear hair cells in mice following genetic deletion or knock down with siRNA targeting p27. Research on hair cell regeneration may bring us closer to clinical treatment for human hearing loss caused by hair cell damage or death. Hair cell Hair cells