From Nuclear DNA Damage to Inflammatory Immune Aging via Cellular Senescence

Today I'll point out an open access paper in which the authors discuss some aspects of DNA damage with a particular focus on age-related inflammation and immune system dysfunction. Cells are fluid, dynamic landscapes of molecular machinery, near every component constantly damaged by inappropriate chemical reactions, but also constantly repaired and replaced. Little is static or lasting. The greatest, most intricate, and effective repair mechanisms are those that attend nuclear DNA, the blueprints for proteins and cellular operations that reside in the cell nucleus. One of the characteristics of aging is that despite the panoply of repair efforts, cells accumulate random nuclear DNA damage. Since the research community can't yet stop this from happening, there is considerable difficulty in separating out and quantifying this one particular contribution to the broader aging process. Certainly we can talk about cancer risk, and we can talk about rising numbers of cells becoming senescent in response to DNA damage, and researchers can disable DNA repair to observe the shortened life spans that result from such a fundamental breakage in cellular operation, but beyond that it becomes increasingly challenging to quantify effects within the scope of normal degenerative aging. If nuclear DNA damage was removed, such as via the somewhat distant molecular nanomachinery of chromallocytes, programmable nanorobots moving from cell to cell to fix each breakage, then aside from the eliminati...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs