Abnormal Stress Granules in Aging and Age-Related Disease

This open access review paper looks at stress granules in the context of aging. These are transient structures that form within cells, made up of a wide variety of biomolecules. There is a lot of information about stress granules in the literature, but a great deal of it is speculative. This is one of the less well explored areas of cellular biochemistry. Cells form these assemblies of under stressful conditions, and their function may be protective - perhaps a way to stash useful molecules and protect them from an aggressive upregulation of cellular maintenance activities, or perhaps a way to make those useful molecules more available to needed locations in the cell by putting a stockpile in close proximity. There is evidence for stress granules to become abnormal in the cells of aged tissues, and this may be due to raised levels of misfolded or otherwise broken proteins and other forms of molecular waste. Whether the consequences are significant in comparison to other, better explored mechanisms of aging remains to be determined. Stress granules (SGs) are membraneless assemblies. They form when cells experience stress conditions, and are thought to influence cellular signaling pathways, and mRNA function, localization, and turn over SGs are dynamic, complex, and variable assemblies, with composition and structure that can vary dramatically under different types of stresses, such as heat shock, oxidative stress, osmotic stress, nutrient starvation, and UV irr...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs