A Study of Cell Size in the Context of Cellular Senescence

Senescent cells are a major problem in our bodies, in that their growing presence over the years is an important cause of degenerative aging. Unfortunately, the research community can't just prevent cells from ever becoming senescent, even were the capacity to do that in hand today, because transient senescence serves many useful, even necessary purposes in our biochemistry. It is only the lingering senescent cells that are the problem. Periodically removing these unwanted, harmful cells is a very viable way forward, however, and a new biotechnology industry is springing up to do just that. One very interesting point about senescent cells is that they are notably larger than normal cells. One research group has produced a way of counting senescent immune cells from a blood sample based on sorting by size. Another measured the sizes of cells in old hearts, before and after clearing out senescent cells with a senolytic treatment, showing that the senescent cells were larger. I have to think that there is something useful, potentially even important, that can be done with this feature of senescent cells - the clever implementation just hasn't arrived yet. In multicellular organisms, cell size ranges over several orders of magnitude. This is most extreme in gametes and polyploid cells but is also seen in diploid somatic cells and unicellular organisms. While cell size varies greatly between cell types, size is narrowly constrained for a given cell type and growth ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs