Towards Restoration of Mitophagy to Reverse Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Alzheimer ' s Disease

Mitochondria are the power plants of the cell, a herd of bacteria-like organelles responsible for packaging energy store molecules used to power the chemistry of life. With age, mitochondria become dysfunctional throughout the body, for reasons that are not yet fully understood, but which clearly contribute to the onset of age-related declines and diseases. There is certainly stochastic damage to mitochondrial DNA that can lead to a small but significant number of pathological cells dumping oxidizing molecules into the surrounding tissue, but the general malaise of mitochondria is more sweeping than this. One important contribution to this universal mitochondrial dysfunction appears to be a progressive failure of mitophagy. Mitophagy is a specialized form of autophagy, a quality control process responsible for flagging and then destroying worn and damaged mitochondria. Researchers have shown that specific component parts of the autophagy process can become less efficient with age, but the culprit here may be that mitochondria change in structure and size, becoming larger and more resilient to clearance by mitophagy. Why exactly this happens is, again, quite unclear at the detail level. Many of the research groups interested in the mitochondrial contribution to aging are focused on mitophagy, however, so we shall see, given time. The brain is an energy-hungry organ, and, like muscle tissue, more profoundly affected by loss of mitochondrial function than is the c...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs