The secret of long life may lurk within the genetic activity profile of sex cells—such as the sperm and eggs of humans, a paper newly published in the research journal Nature suggests.
Sex cells, and the lineage of cells that develop into them, are “immortal” in the sense that once they are used to create a new organism, they don’t die. Instead they bring about the production of all the new creature’s cells, including more sex cells.
Only the non-sex cells—called somatic cells—are doomed to age and die, typically by accumulating damage, debris and mutations.
Gary Ruvkun, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues found in the new study that the gene activity in somatic cells of long-lived nematode worm mutants resembles that of “germline,” or sex cells. Switching to germline characteristics may therefore confer health benefits and longevity to these mutant worms, according to Ruvkun’s team.
The similarity in the somatic cells’ gene activity profile to that of sex cells largely involved decrease in a pattern of chemical activity known as insulin-like signalling, according to the researchers.
The altered genetic activity also made the non-sex cells more resistant to toxicity, the group reported. This makes sense, they added, because some theories hold that aging evolved as a trade-off in which organisms diverted resources toward maintaining and protecting the reproductive cells at the expense of the others.
“Given that protection of the germ line is an evolutionarily shared trait across species, it will be interesting to investigate whether this is a broadly conserved mechanism of modulating lifespan” for other animals, including humans, wrote the scientists.
“The idea that somatic cells maintain the potential to reacquire pathways lost during differentiation [generation of new cells] is tantalizing,” they added, and may help researchers develop “therapeutics to assist in cellular repair and possibly regeneration.”
The paper appears in the June 8 advance online issue of the journal.
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| The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, about 1 mm long. (Image courtesy NIH) |
Only the non-sex cells—called somatic cells—are doomed to age and die, typically by accumulating damage, debris and mutations.
Gary Ruvkun, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues found in the new study that the gene activity in somatic cells of long-lived nematode worm mutants resembles that of “germline,” or sex cells. Switching to germline characteristics may therefore confer health benefits and longevity to these mutant worms, according to Ruvkun’s team.
The similarity in the somatic cells’ gene activity profile to that of sex cells largely involved decrease in a pattern of chemical activity known as insulin-like signalling, according to the researchers.
The altered genetic activity also made the non-sex cells more resistant to toxicity, the group reported. This makes sense, they added, because some theories hold that aging evolved as a trade-off in which organisms diverted resources toward maintaining and protecting the reproductive cells at the expense of the others.
“Given that protection of the germ line is an evolutionarily shared trait across species, it will be interesting to investigate whether this is a broadly conserved mechanism of modulating lifespan” for other animals, including humans, wrote the scientists.
“The idea that somatic cells maintain the potential to reacquire pathways lost during differentiation [generation of new cells] is tantalizing,” they added, and may help researchers develop “therapeutics to assist in cellular repair and possibly regeneration.”
The paper appears in the June 8 advance online issue of the journal.
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