Why Aging Cells Lose Their Healing Ability

Why Aging Cells Struggle to Heal: Insights from a New Study During aging, the cells’ capability to replace the damaged tissues is compromised, especially in muscles. A study conducted at Cornell University helps to answer this question, and provides perhaps the best look so far, at why muscle cells age and lose their regenerative properties (1^✔ ✔Trusted Source
Transcriptomic analysis of skeletal muscle regeneration across mouse lifespan identifies altered stem cell states

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The Mystery of Aging Muscles

The study by Ben Cosgrove, associate professor of biomedical engineering, aimed to address a long-standing question in skeletal muscle biology: Whether the decrease in muscular regenerative capacity with aging is consequently the result of intrinsic alterations of muscle stem cells or whether age-related communication disruption with the stem cell niche plays a vital role.

Published in? Nature Aging, the research explored the intricacies of muscle regeneration using a mouse model.

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Knowledge about Aging

Scientists induced the muscles of young, senesced, and geriatric mice by employing a variant of snake venom toxin to compare cellular communication over six different time points on the injured muscles. The scientists divided the cell types into 29 subtypes, some of which included the immune cells and muscle stem cells studying how these cells change as people age.

Specific discovery included the fact that as muscles grow older, immune cells, which act as the main hub for the tissue repair process, lose their coordination. Its steps are not well-timed; they visit at the wrong time during the wound healing period. Moreover, the muscle stem cells, which normally undergo division during young ages, get quiescent as muscles progress in growth and age, further aggravating regeneration.

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A New Method to Study Aging Cells

The research team developed a new method that defines cellular quiescence—the state in which cells are unable to proliferate.

“We came up with a transfer-learning-based approach,” said Lauren Walter, the first author of the work and a doctoral candidate in Cosgrove’s laboratory at the time. Using this approach, the team was able to obtain scores for senescence of cells using a particular set of genes and assess how it adapted to aging and response to injury.

This approach gave a more accurate view of how interactions between cell types contribute to senescence and how the latter could be targeted for treatments.

The results bear great implications to the development of drugs that target senescent cells, which may help to improve tissue repair and stem cell proliferation in aging populations. Understanding more about the immune cells and muscle stem cells in the body, more working out can be done to formulate treatment for the dis-coordinated repair mechanisms seen on tissues in older organisms.

Reference:

1. Transcriptomic analysis of skeletal muscle regeneration across mouse lifespan identifies altered stem cell states - (https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-024-00756-3)

Source-Medindia