One approach to promote tyrosinase maturation in melanocytes in culture is to increase the levels of tyrosine or L-DOPA, which accounts for an early observation, prior to genetic classification of albinism, that
hairbulbs incubated in high levels of tyrosine could indicate whether the type of OCA was tyrosinase-negative (no increase in melanin) or -positive (heavily pigmented
hairbulbs post incubation).