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Applying baby oil is a simple, safe, inexpensive and easily administered treatment for itchy skin in haemodialysis patients. By preventing or reducing uremic pruritus, baby oil treatment may also improve quality of life in this patient group.

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T he single cell zygote contains all of the information required for the development of an adult organism. Understanding how this information is decoded, processed, and deciphered to create the amazing structures we animals are is a major incomplete scientific challenge. How are instructions for organizing body forms encoded as instructions at the molecular level? What information determines which part of the developing embryo will become the future head and what part the future limb? It is amazing how symmetry is maintained in the evolution of complex body designs. Understanding the action of a group of genes, called homeobox genes, has improved our current knowledge of these aspects of developmental genetics and the evolution of complex body forms.Homeobox genes were first discovered in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Mutations in single genes were noted to produce flies that had normal body parts in abnormal places: legs where antennae were supposed to be, duplication of body segments producing an extra pair of wings, or the growth of an eye on a wing. It takes hundreds of genes to produce limbs, body segments with wings, and eyes; yet here were single genes that controlled all of those genes necessary to produce complex normal structures and place the parts in an abnormal location. Several of these control genes were sequenced and found to be similar in structure and function. They were named homeobox genes, from the Greek "homeosis," which is the replacement of one body part by another. Each gene contained a 180 base-pair in length (the homeobox) sequence, which when expressed produces a 60 amino acid length protein. This protein then goes back into the nucleus, folds into three helices, and attaches at proper points on the DNA to act as transcription factors that control a host of genes. Homeobox genes are found in all animals and many plants and fungi. They predate even the divisions of the living kingdoms. They are highly conserved (ie, the sequence that affects the thorax of the fly similarly affects the thorax of vertebrates).Certain homeobox genes (HOX genes) are linked together in a cluster and are transcribed in an order that corresponds to the temporal and structural development of an embryo. Transcription begins at the 3' end of the strand where the head structures are controlled and proceeds down to the 5' end where the genes that control the hind structures are found. The timing, sequence, and dosage of expression of several developmental genes that play an important role in embryonic