Dr. Martin Picard

What...

The signature, the molecular signature that was the most robust comparing the white hair to the dark hair in the same person or comparing white to dark in different people was mitochondrial proteins.

And I did not expect that.

And we repeated those experiments in two different proteomics core.

And the proteomics core hated that experiment because hair is like notoriously, it's full of keratin, those super high abundance proteins.

And then they mask every other signal.

But we were able to kind of get

good resolution data for other non-keratin, non-hair proteins.

And three mitochondrial proteins were consistently upregulated.

There was more of the mitochondrial energy transformation machinery in the gray hair compared to the dark hair.

Decrease, yeah.

Most people know when you sleep, your heart rate goes down and a bunch of your body temperature goes down and that,

allows us to stay alive with 10%, 15% lower energy expenditure.

And they're different between different people, but 10%, 15% is kind of an average of how much energy you're saving by sleeping.

And there's a theory of why does every animal need to sleep?

And if you sleep deprive a mouse or a rat or an animal,

They die eventually.

And we know from severe cases of mania and bipolar disease, people can die from going without sleep for multiple days.

And that might be one hypothesis because sleep saves or conserves energy.

And if you don't go into that state of torpor, almost like mini hibernation, then somehow the organism can't sustain that.