Too much sun is bad for your skin, and a tan is one of our best defences against it. Now biologists have found the gene responsible for triggering tanning when skin is exposed to ultraviolet light. It turns out to be a well-known tumour suppressor called p53, often dubbed the “guardian of the genome”.
Other steps in the tanning process, which results in increased production of the pigment melanin, have already been documented. Yet until now no one knew how sunlight starts it all off. David Fisher and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School in Boston found that UV light…
