How to slow down cellular aging
Scientists from Moscow State University told how to slow down cellular aging
Their findings were presented in the journal Aging (Anisimova et al., Protein synthesis and quality control in aging).
"Some of the newly discovered substances that inhibit the assembly of proteins significantly extend the lifespan of a variety of organisms. This gives hope that in the near future there will be modulators of protein synthesis that will help humanity to prolong an active and healthy period of life without any side effects," said Sergey Dmitriev from the Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology of Moscow State University.
In recent years, scientists have found more and more evidence that the rate of decrepitude of the human body as a whole depends not only on how quickly damage accumulates in its DNA and how often its cells divide, but also on how effectively they recycle various "garbage", including damaged proteins.
The rate of "burning" of this garbage, as experiments on calorie restriction of the diet show, can be changed, forcing cells to believe that they are constantly experiencing a lack of nutrients.
In such cases, they begin to actively process the proteins they already have and collect new copies of these molecules less often, which significantly delays the onset of cellular old age and senility of tissues and organs.
Successes in such experiments, as Dmitriev notes, make him and hundreds of other scientists think about whether it is possible to "deceive" the body and turn on these gene chains responsible for accelerated protein processing and slowing down the assembly of their new molecules using synthetic drugs or natural molecules.
"Now we suspect that an aging and already less active organism suppresses translation in order to save energy and not overload its "littered" cells with new proteins. However, he cannot slow down the synthesis so that it is possible to "sort out the blockages" and stop aging," adds Alexandra Anisimova, Dmitriev's colleague at Moscow State University.
Guided by this idea, Russian scientists combined and compared the results of all experiments in this field, trying to understand how the activity of genes responsible for protein assembly and processing changes with age.
It turned out that virtually all the gene chains associated with the assembly or processing of proteins changed their work as they aged. Moreover, many of the "aging genes", as discovered by Russian molecular biologists, were directly related to the process of synthesis and destruction of protein molecules.
Scientists hope that further study of such genes and their chains will help to understand how you can learn to control the speed of assembly and processing of proteins in the human body without disrupting the work of other cellular systems. This will help prolong life and at the same time make a person as healthy as possible.
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