Changes in the Behavior of Lipid Rafts in Aging

It is fair to say that everything changes with age, every aspect of cellular biochemistry. That doesn't mean that researchers can point to any specific change and say that it is important, however. It could be far downstream from underlying causes. It could be hard to fix in comparison to those causes. It may be shown to detrimentally affect a range of vital cellular processes, but those mechanisms could turn out to be minor and unimportant in comparison to others. The major challenge in aging research is exactly that everything changes. It is thus very hard to determine the importance of any given change, given that it takes place in this complex environment of interacting dysfunction, chains of cause and consequence, a network falling into failure. Lipid rafts are assemblies that constantly form and break down in and around the cell membrane, a complex little world in and of itself. The cell membrane influences everything to do with cell signaling, uptake of materials from the environment, export of materials from the cell, and a good many other things besides. Thus any changed aspect of the cell membrane, such as altered behavior of lipid rafts, will also influence these line items. But is it important? That is a hard and expensive question to answer. Theorizing costs little, however, and thus we see a great deal of theorizing. Today's open access paper is good example of a fairly aggressive joining of dots with little to no support for the importance of the ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs