A recent research into the long-term partial resetting of cells in rodents seems to have yielded some really exciting findings.
Researchers are overjoyed that we can apply this strategy over the lifespan of conventional animals to slow down aging. In mice, the method has been both safe and efficacious.
The researchers discovered that the mice’s kidney and skin cells were revitalized — that is, the activation of genes involved in inflammatory response, death of cells, and response to stress were decreased in the treated rodents. Additionally, the skin was able to flourish more as well as scar less – the polar opposite of what occurs in advanced age. Additionally, the animals’ epigenetic timers — a proxy for the sequences of DNA methylation rates associated with aging – appeared to be reset.
The scientists conducted experiments using four well-characterized proteins that govern DNA expression, collectively referred to as “Yamanaka factors,” after the person who developed the procedure in stem cells.
Along with addressing age-related disorders, this technique may give the scientific field a new tool for restoring tissue and biological systems’ health by enhancing cellular functions and robustness in a variety of disease states, including neurodegenerative disorders.
While this procedure can be used to convert adult cells back to stem cells, the team of experts initially demonstrated that it could also be used to ‘partly reprogram’ the cells, returning them to a younger state but not totally transforming them back into stem cells. If sufficient cells in an actual animal are affected in the same way, the entire organism’s body clock may seem fresher.
Ultimately, this work suggests that long-term restricted resetting may hold promise as a means of restoring and rejuvenating the activities of some tissues. Notably, partial reprogramming effectively modifies the epigenetic clock. Additionally, witnessing these outcomes in a regularly aging mouse model demonstrates that this strategy may be advantageous in situations other than illness settings.
The study was published in Nature Aging.
