Anti-aging treatments for muscle stem cells

How to Rejuvenate Muscle Stem Cells

Kirill Stasevich, CompulentaWith age, our muscles weaken and become less mobile, and this is due to the fact that stem cells lose the ability to renew both muscle fibers and themselves.

Until now, however, it was believed that the stem cells themselves do not change with age, and the aging environment is to blame for the fact that they cease to perform their functions.

However, as Helen Blau and her colleagues from Stanford University (USA) have shown, muscle stem cells also deteriorate with age: in old mice, two-thirds of such stem cells could not perform their functions even when they were transplanted to younger animals.

Muscle stem cell (photo by Dennis Kunkel Microscopy, Inc.).

The researchers managed not only to detect signs of aging in muscle stem cells, but also to reverse the process, that is, in other words, to rejuvenate the aged cells.

In the journal Nature Medicine, scientists report that in stem cells taken from two-year-old mice (which corresponds, with certain reservations, to 80 years of human life), the signaling pathway associated with one of the MAP kinases is too active (Cosgrove et al., Rejuvenation of the muscle stem cell population restores strength to injured aged muscles). When this signal chain works, the stem cell divides worse and enters the path of specialization.

When this signaling pathway was suppressed with the help of special drugs and a special method of cultivation, old stem cells literally became young: they regained the ability to maintain their own line, that is, with each division to form the same stem cell.

It is clear that this increased the possibilities for potential muscle regeneration. The renewed cells were transplanted back to mice, in which they occupied their usual niche, and two months after transplantation, young forces returned to the old animals. That is, the cells were not just updated, they were now actively updating the muscles themselves.

What's next? Of course, the authors of the work intend to check whether it is possible to renew cells and muscles in humans in the same way.

Prepared based on the materials of the Stanford University Medical School:
Researchers rejuvenate stem cell population from elderly mice, enabling muscle recovery.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru18.02.2014