Professor, MCB Division of Immunology and Molecular Medicine, UC Berkeley
How does aging occur? Does each cell determine its own age, regardless of other cells in the body? Or does there exist a hierarchy in which cells coordinate aging across the entire organism so that each tissue and organ age at the same rate? If the latter, which cells and which process would be coordinated, and how? The mechanisms surrounding how individual cells age, whether yeast or mammalian cells grown in culture, have been exhaustively studied and rely on large part to the replicative potential of the cell. However, how cells within an animal age has largely not been explained. Work of the Dillin group has broken down the barriers of metazoan aging to reveal that this process is coordinated across the multiple cell types and not merely left to stochastic chance by each individual cell. Our findings not only reveal which cells perform the coordination, but also the molecules required for communicating aging across cells types and their downstream consequences.
Hosted by Dr. Ted Weinert
