Recent Insight into the Processes of Rejuvenation that Act to Ensure the Offspring of Adult Parents are Born Young

Parents and their germline cells are biologically old, and yet developing offspring produced from the germline are biologically young. Therefore a form of cellular rejuvenation takes place somewhere between the start and the end of reproduction in multicellular organisms, whether they are nematode worms of a few hundred cells, or vastly larger and more complex species such as our own. New research on this topic from the usually secretive research groups at Calico was widely announced today; it is focused on the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, but the findings are probably of relevance to the processes of rejuvenation that take place in mammalian reproduction. Aging is a matter of accumulated damage, of quite similar forms in nematodes and mammals: to make offspring young, all of this damage must be cleared away, or the germline shielded from it. The rejuvenation that occurs in mammalian zygotes is not all that well characterized, though you'll find papers on the topic from recent years. It appears to overlap with processes observed to take place when cells are reprogrammed into a state of induced pluripotency: researchers have seen mitochondrial damage repaired, for example. This present work in nematodes is interesting for its focus on the lysosome and clearance of metabolic waste, as there isn't all that much work on what happens to such waste during induced pluripotency or in early mammalian embryonic development. Clearly it has to be successfully removed if presen...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs