Dr. Martin Picard

Well, inflammation costs energy.

Inflammation costs energy.

And making a cytokine costs energy.

And if you're a cell and you have a receptor for a cytokine and the cytokine docks, the ligand docks, that's going to cost energy.

It's a correlation.

Maybe with the hair graying, I think what connects the hair graying with everything else we've talked about is the analysis we did of knowing like molecularly what happened when this one hair goes gray and then it recovers its color.

what's happening energetically.

So we took a single hair and chopped it into pieces and did proteomics.

You have to, because you're a molecular biologist, right?

And I mean, mitochondria is our way to tap into the biology of energy.

So then we thought maybe there's something there.

And initially, I didn't think there was mitochondria in the hair.

It turns out every hair that we walk around with is loaded with mitochondrial DNA.

And, you know, forensic, if you find a hair on a crime scene, you can figure out who is there.

The DNA that gets sequenced is not the nuclear genome.

It's a mitochondrial genome.

Really?

Because hairs have a very high concentration of mitochondrial DNA.

We don't do forensics.

Sure, you don't.