Aging & Longevity

Cytokines and their receptors play important roles in brain development and aging-related disease, but their functions within the healthy adult brain remain poorly understood. Here, we show that pyramidal neurons in hippocampal CA1 induce Fn14 expression in response to activity and environmental enrichment. Once expressed, Fn14 dampens the activity of these neurons most prominently at the daily transition between light and dark. Fn14 expression in CA1 neurons is regulated by the circadian...

Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD^(+)) levels decline with age, which has been associated with the development of aging-associated diseases. However, it remains unknown whether low NAD^(+) levels in early life affect aging. This study demonstrates that deficiency of NAD synthetase (NADS), a critical enzyme of the deamidated NAD^(+) biosynthesis pathway, drastically reduced NAD^(+) levels in skeletal muscle and impaired muscle function at a young age. Intriguingly, NAD^(+) levels were...

Energy metabolism involves a series of biochemical reactions that generate ATP, utilizing substrates such as glucose and oxygen supplied via cerebral blood flow. Energy substrates are metabolized in multiple interrelated pathways that are cell- and organelle-specific. These pathways not only generate energy but are also fundamental to the production of essential biomolecules required for neuronal function and survival. How these complex biochemical processes are spatially distributed across the...

Dysregulation of the adaptive immune system is a key feature of aging and is associated with age-related chronic diseases and mortality. Here, we find that T cell aging, especially in the CD4 subset, is controlled by B cells. B cells contributed to the age-related reduction of naive CD4 T cells, their differentiation toward immunosenescent T cell subsets, and age-associated T cell receptor clonal restriction. Concurrently, mice lacking B cells displayed improvements in health span and life span....

The elegant work by Maejima et al. recently published in Aging Cell reveals a previously unrecognized mechanism linking age-related oxytocin (OXT) decline to epigenetic remodeling, mitochondrial dysfunction, and systemic inflammation (Maejima et al. 2025). Beyond documenting this relationship, the authors demonstrate its remarkable reversibility through nasal OXT administration. These findings provide the first molecular evidence supporting what has long been proposed: that the OXT system...

A newly identified specific category of non-coding RNA (ncRNA), circRNAs, is drawing interest for their role in controlling several biological processes including muscle regeneration, aging, and adaptation to physical activity. Unlike linear RNAs, circRNAs are very stable and can have long-lasting regulatory impact since they create a covalently closed loop structure. Emerging evidence indicates that circRNAs play a pivotal role in skeletal muscle biology by regulating myogenesis, satellite cell...

Episodic sequence memory is crucial for daily functioning and typically declines during aging. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this decline remain poorly understood. We examined the resting-state functional connectivity (FC) correlates of sequence memory in healthy older adults (OA), with a young adult (YA) group included for comparison. Thirty-eight OA (mean ± SD age: 69.9 ± 3.9 years; 24 women) and 20 YA (mean ± SD age: 24.2 ± 3.4 years; 14 women) completed a sequence memory task and...

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To maintain protein homeostasis, which is essential for health, animals have developed complex protective mechanisms against various acute and chronic stresses. However, the coordination of responses to these protein stresses, especially their age-dependent changes, is not well understood. HSF-1 is a key regulator of protein homeostasis. Our study identifies PBS-7, a proteasome subunit, as its crucial regulator. In aged C. elegans, decreased PBS-7 binding reduces proteasome-mediated degradation...

CONCLUSION: Ubiquitination modification, autophagy process, cellular senescence and nervous system regulation may jointly contribute to the core molecular mechanism of ARHL. The hsa-miR-100-5p, hsa-miR-23b-3p, hsa-miR-373-3p, and hsa-miR-27b-3p may preliminarily act as key regulatory factors to participate in the pathophysiological process of ARHL, providing exploratory evidence for their potential application value as molecular markers.

Senescence is a tripartite cellular phenotype characterized by permanent growth arrest, resistance to apoptosis, and high secretory activity. Besides its physiological role in embryonic development and pathophysiological contribution to age-related tissue degeneration, in the context of tumor development senescence is an important suppressor mechanism, that counteracts accelerated proliferation. Among the many stressors that induce senescence is the external stimulation by cytokines. Although...

Aging is characterized by a progressive decline in physiological resilience and functional capacity, often accompanied by chronic, low-grade systemic inflammation, a phenomenon termed "inflammaging". This persistent inflammatory milieu contributes significantly to musculoskeletal degeneration, impaired neuromotor coordination, and reduced mobility, collectively diminishing quality of life, particularly among older adults. Key biological drivers of inflammaging include cellular senescence, immune...

During aging, stem cell persistence is favored over functionality, resulting in delayed responses to injury.

The genetic contribution to human longevity is greater than previously thought.

How heritable is human life span? If genetic heritability is high, longevity genes can reveal aging mechanisms and inform medicine and public health. However, current estimates of heritability are low-twin studies show heritability of only 20 to 25%, and recent large pedigree studies suggest it is as low as 6%. Here we show that these estimates are confounded by extrinsic mortality-deaths caused by extrinsic factors such as accidents or infections. We use mathematical modeling and analyses of...

DNA-protein cross-links (DPCs) are highly toxic DNA lesions that block replication and transcription, but their impact on organismal physiology is unclear. We identified a role for the metalloprotease SPRTN in preventing DPC-driven immunity and its pathological consequences. Loss of SPRTN activity during replication and mitosis lead to unresolved DNA damage, chromosome segregation errors, micronuclei formation, and cytosolic DNA release that activates the cyclic GMP-AMP synthase...

Plants display a wide range of life spans and aging rates. Although dynamic changes to DNA methylation are a hallmark of aging in mammals, it is unclear whether similar molecular signatures reflect rates of aging and organism life span in plants. In this work, we show that the short-lived model plant Arabidopsis thaliana exhibits a loss of epigenetic integrity during aging, which causes DNA methylation decay and the expression of transposable elements. We show that the rate of epigenetic aging...

Aging is characterized by a decline in the ability of tissue repair and regeneration after injury. In skeletal muscle, this decline is largely driven by impaired function of muscle stem cells (MuSCs) to efficiently contribute to muscle regeneration. We uncovered a cause of this aging-associated dysfunction: a cellular survivorship bias that prioritizes stem cell persistence at the expense of functionality. With age, MuSCs increased expression of a tumor suppressor, N-myc down-regulated gene 1...

The co-evolution of mitochondria and the nucleus established constant mito-nuclear communication that is essential for both cellular and organismal homeostasis. At the cell-autonomous level, mitochondrial perturbations activate retrograde pathways such as the mitochondrial unfolded protein response (UPR^(mt)) and the mitochondrial integrated stress response (ISR^(mt)), which couple organelle dysfunction to nuclear transcriptional programs, thereby promoting mitochondrial function and preserving...

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