Recent Papers on the Mitochondrial Contribution to Aging

Mitochondria are the power plants of the cell, a herd of self-replicating structures evolved from ancient symbiotic bacteria, now fully integrated into the cell. Their primary task is the production of chemical energy stores, an energetic process that produces damaging reactive molecules as a side-effect. Much of the original bacterial DNA of the distant ancestors of today's mitochondia has migrated to the cell nucleus, leaving only a tiny remnant genome in the mitochondria themselves. When looking across species with widely divergent life spans, researchers have found good correlations between species life span and some combination of mitochondrial activity (metabolic rate) and mitochondrial composition (how resilient mitochondria are to oxidative damage). This strongly suggests, independently of the copious other evidence, that mitochondria are important determinants of aging and longevity.

There are numerous ways to look at the complexities of the mitochondrial contribution to aging, and until specific repair technologies successfully reverse that contribution, the degree to which different age-related changes in mitochondria are more or less relevant to aging will continue to be a topic of active debate and exploration. In the SENS viewpoint, damage to mitochondrial DNA is most important as a primary cause of aging. It occurs either during replication or as a result of damage from reactive molecules, and can produce mitochondria that are both faulty and able to rep...

Source: Fight Aging! - January 16, 2018 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs