Lamin B1 in the Age-Related Loss of Neural Stem Cell Activity

Neurogenesis is the creation and integration of new neurons into neural circuits, necessary for learning, and for the maintenance of functional brain tissue. Neural stem cells are responsible for providing a supply of new neurons, but, as is the case for stem cells throughout the body, their activity declines with age. Loss of neurogenesis is one important contributing factor in the aging of the brain. Considered at the high level, a progressive loss of stem cell activity may be an evolved response to rising levels of cell and tissue damage and dysfunction, reducing the risk of death by cancer at the cost of a slow decline into death by loss of tissue function. At the low level, scientists are digging in to the specific mechanisms involved in age-related stem cell dysfunction. Today's research materials are an example of this sort of research program, focused on neural stem cells in this case. All stem cells produce daughter somatic cells via replication in order to maintain the tissues that they support. Stem cells practice asymmetric cell division as one of several necessary strategies needed to maintain the pace of replication over a lifetime. They unload accumulated metabolic waste and damaged components onto each new daughter somatic cell in order to keep the level of damage in the stem cell low. Researchers here identified that lamin B1 is important in ensuring this asymmetry in neural stem cells, but levels decline with age. They used a gene therapy approach to ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs