Hair loss affects roughly 61 million people in the United States. More than 95% of hair thinning in men is attributed to male pattern baldness, or androgenetic alopecia. The hair loss product market is a multi-billion dollar market: in the United States alone, this market’s annual revenue is 7 billion dollars, with 3.5% annual growth rate from 2007 to 2012, yet a sufficient solution has yet to be made available. The trigger for androgenetic alopecia is believed to be dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a derivative of testosterone. This summer, we are engineering Bacillus Subtilis, a model organism for a bacterium found naturally on the scalp, to secrete 3α-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase (3-α-HSD). This enzyme reduces DHT to a non-steroidically active compound, using NADPH and NADH as cofactors.

Our project consists of 3 main parts: 3-α-HSD secretion by the bacterium, engineered bacterium for NADPH overproduction, and a comb as a tool to create a user-friendly experience. By synchronizing these parts, we hope to be able to show convincing evidence of DHT breakdown, providing a promising platform for treatment of male pattern baldness! The whole site is rendered by mediawiki's default template, which includes the igem login bar. The default template wraps the entire HTML code that I put inside mediawiki and limits the page's width. It took a lot of time to find the class that makes this limit and change it's properties. This change altered the login bar's appearance a little bit. I wanted to know if this change violates the instructions or not (you can see it by comparing the bar on our wiki to the normal bar). I compared the login bar on your wiki to the regular login bar. The only big difference is that the username (or the word "login") changes position instead of being fixed to the left of the "hamburger menu" icon. I think this is a small enough change that it would not be considered a violation of the rules. However, if you want to put it back, you could write new rules for the element "#top_menu_inside #user_item".