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https://elifesciences.org/articles/76911
An article from last year has come up in the Science news about hair in
mammals. Reptiles have scutes and scales, birds have feathers and
scutes, and mammals have hair. This paper looked at how hair has
evolved among mammals. They looked at the conserved non-coding
sequences (usually regulatory) and over 19,000 genes and analyzed them
to identify the sequences that showed differential rates of evolution
among the 62 taxa included in the study. They found that genes involved
in the physical structure of the hair had more rapid evolution in the
coding sequence of the genes that would affect the structure of the
hair, but the rate of change for their regulation was the same as for
most other genes. The genes involved in the regulation of making hair
showed the opposite. The coding sequence of these regulatory genes
evolved at the same rate as most of the other genes in the genome, but
their regulatory sequences had an elevated rate of evolution. This
makes sense because when you look at mammals there is mostly a shift in
how the production of hair is regulated to make major changes between
species. Humans have the same number of hair folicles as a chimp, but
most of the hairs are too small to be noticeable.
One conclusion from the research is that humans retain all the genes
that our ancestors had for making hair, but how that hair production is
regulated has changed in the human lineage to produce something that
looks like a relatively hairless primate.
Ron Okimoto
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