The project was aimed at finding new methods to address age related problems and how to slow down or treat onset of age related diseases such as dementia and other neurological diseases.
As general life expectancy increases society faces the growing challenge to provide the aging population with healthcare and welfare, making it urgent to unravel basic principles of biological aging at the cellular level.
Organelles are the cell equivalence to organs in the body with each providing and fulfilling specific functions. Aging cells have been shown to stop functioning one after another, but it is unclear what causes it. Organelles are coordinated to counteract damage to proteins occurring in cells, interdependencies are very important to health and aging.
Mitochondrium are one of the cell organelles acting as the powerplant. Production of mitochondrial proteins controls the well being of the whole cell via what was up until now unknown communication links. When mitochondria are exposed to stress a protective program is triggered to keep functions of cells in check, which is a mechanism also operating cell aging. Aging in cells has been shown by this study to happen when communication between the organelles collapses causing vital cellular functions to deteriorate or completely fail.
Collaborative discovery was based on studies of yeast cells, which may seem to some to have few human similarities, but the mechanisms controlling aging at cellular level are essentially the same; making it highly likely that aging mechanisms identified at cellular levels by the researchers in this study are also active within human cells.
The team hope to investigate how, when, and why communications between cellular organelles ceases to function during aging to gain further understandings which can be used to develop therapies to work towards treating the communication failure.
