Re: curly&Straight hair

Date: Tue Oct 20 16:51:45 1998
Posted By: Dan Berger, Faculty Chemistry/Science, Bluffton College
Area of science: Anatomy
ID: 900697373.An

Message:

I was reading one of the things you wrote back to some one on the message board about the difference between curly hair and straight hair. Well my question is, is there and possiable way to make straight hair naturaly curly and if so,how?

Curly hair differs from straight hair in the number of disulfide bond cross-links between methionine and cysteine amino acid units in individual keratin protein molecules. I am not certain how much variability there is between people in the methionine+cysteine content of their keratin. Certainly you can increase the number of disulfide bonds - and hence the amount of curl - chemically; this is called a perma nent wave.

To change naturally straight hair into naturally curly hair you would need to do one (or maybe both) of two things:

Alter the biochemistry of the hair follicle so that more disulfide bonds are formed as the hair grows (that is, make the follicle chemistry more oxidizing).
Alter the genes of the hair follicle so that more methionine and/or cysteine is incorporated into the keratin of the hair.

I know of no way to actually accomplish the biochemical or genetic modifications I have suggested above.

	Dan Berger
	Bluffton College
	http://cs.bluffton.edu/~berger

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