Aging & Longevity

CONCLUSION: GS research is transitioning from fundamental mechanisms to clinical diagnostics and therapeutics. Future advancements necessitate the integration of multimodal imaging technologies and interdisciplinary collaboration to facilitate early AD diagnosis and therapeutic target development. This study represents the first systematic construction of a knowledge framework for this field, providing theoretical foundations for optimizing research strategies and translational pathways.

INTRODUCTION: The entorhinal cortex (EC)-hippocampus system is critical for memory and affected early in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Cognitive dysfunction in AD is linked to neuropathological changes, including non-heme iron accumulation in vulnerable brain regions. This study characterized iron distribution in the EC-hippocampus system using ultra-high field (UHF) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at 7 Tesla (T) in aging and mild cognitive impairment (MCI), an AD at-risk state.

The increasing prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases in an aging population underscores the critical need for reliable biomarkers distinguishing normal aging from pathological neurodegeneration. This study leverages neuroimaging to identify age-resilient biomarkers, establishing a baseline of neural features that are relatively stable across the aging process. Our research objectives are threefold: (a) Validate a methodology using leverage scores to identify age-robust neural signatures; (b)...

CONCLUSION: Increased arterial stiffness and reduced CBF were not independently associated with smaller HV. However, in combination, persistently elevated AS and reduced CBF is associated with smaller HV. These effects were equally exerted across all hippocampal subfields tested. Our findings suggest a lag effect in the arterial stiffness and hippocampal volume relationship. We propose that the subsequent reduction in cerebral blood flow observed with elevated arterial stiffness may be the...

Evidence indicates that the integrity of in utero development influences late life healthy or unhealthy aging; however, specific links between them are unclear. Histone chaperone HIRA is thought to play a role in both life stages, and here, we explore this role using the murine pigmentary system by investigating and comparing the effects of its lineage-specific knockout, either conditionally during embryogenesis or postnatally. Embryonic knockout of Hira in tyrosinase+ neural crest-derived...

The nuclear chromatin landscape changes with age. Here, we investigate whether chromatin alterations distinguish also animals with unusual aging rates, focusing on Caenorhabditis elegans with reduced insulin/IGF-like signaling (IIS), i.e., daf-2 mutants. In these animals, enhancer regions that close with age tend to open and become transcriptionally active. We identify LIN-39 as a transcription factor (TF) binding these regions and being required for the longevity of daf-2 mutants. LIN-39 acts...

The utilization of artificial intelligence in studying the dysregulation of gene expression in Alzheimer's disease (AD) affected brain tissues remains underexplored, particularly in delineating common and specific transcriptomic signatures across different brain regions implicated in AD-related cellular and molecular processes, which could help illuminate novel disease biology for biomarker and target discovery. Herein we developed a deep learning framework, which consisted of multi-layer...

To gain a comprehensive, unbiased perspective on molecular changes in the brain that may underlie the need for sleep, we have characterized the transcriptomes of single cells isolated from rested and sleep-deprived flies. Here we report that transcripts upregulated after sleep deprivation, in sleep-control neurons projecting to the dorsal fan-shaped body^(1,2) (dFBNs) but not ubiquitously in the brain, encode almost exclusively proteins with roles in mitochondrial respiration and ATP synthesis....

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Accumulation of senescent cells is closely linked with intervertebral disc (IVD) degeneration, a prevalent age-dependent chronic disorder causing low back pain. While previous studies have highlighted that platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) mitigated IVD degeneration through anti-apoptotic and pro-anabolic effects, its impact on IVD cell senescence remains elusive. In this study, human NP and AF cells derived from aged, degenerated IVDs were treated with recombinant human (rh) PDGF-AB/BB for...

CONCLUSION: Lower heel eBMD is independently associated with increased dementia risk among older adults.

Microglia are the brain's resident immune cells known for their dynamic responses to tissue and vascular injury. However, few studies have explored how microglial activity differs across the life stages of early development, adulthood, and aging. Using two-photon live imaging, we confirm that microglia in the adult cerebral cortex exhibit highly ramified processes and relatively immobile somata under basal conditions. Their responses to focal laser-induced injury occur over minutes and are...

Vacuolar acidification is crucial for the homeostasis of intracellular pH and the recycling of proteins and nutrients in cells, thereby playing important roles in various physiological processes related to vacuolar function. The key factors regulating vacuolar acidification and underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Here, we report that Arabidopsis phospholipase Dζ2 (PLDζ2) promotes the acidification of the vacuolar lumen to stimulate autophagic degradation under phosphorus deficiency. The pldζ2...

Training has emerged as a promising materials design technique in which function can be achieved through repeated physical modification of an existing material rather than by direct chemical functionalization, cutting, or reprocessing. This work investigates both the ability to train for function and then to erase that function on-demand in macroscopic metamaterials made from liquid crystal elastomers. We first show that the Poisson's ratio of these disordered arrays can be tuned via directed...

Aging induces substantial structural and functional decline in the retina, yet the molecular drivers of this process remain elusive. In this study, we used heterochronic parabiosis (HP) combined with single-cell RNA sequencing to generate comprehensive transcriptomic profiles of murine retinas from young, aged, and HP pairs, aiming to identify antiaging targets. Our analysis revealed extensive transcriptional alterations across retinal cell types with aging. HP experiments demonstrated that...

Age-dependent changes in DNA methylation allow chronological and biological age inference, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Using ultra-deep sequencing of >300 blood samples from healthy individuals, we show that age-dependent methylation changes occur regionally across clusters of CpG sites either stochastically or in a coordinated block-like manner. Deep learning of single-molecule patterns from two genomic loci predicts chronological age with a median accuracy of 1.36-1.7 years...

Cellular senescence plays a dual role in tissue biology by promoting tumor suppression and wound healing when transient but driving inflammation, fibrosis, and age-related disease when persistent. The growing recognition that senescent cell clearance can reverse these pathologies has catalyzed efforts to develop therapeutics that preferentially kill senescent cells (also known as "senolytics"). However, clinical translation from bench to bedside remains challenging due to senescent state...

Across species, the "pace of life"-encompassing development, reproduction, and senescence-varies widely, yet the molecular mechanisms that regulate these interspecies trajectories of aging remain elusive. Even among vertebrates, a 1000-fold difference in life span is observed between species, ranging from several months in the turquoise killifish to half a millennium in the Greenland shark. As a relatively "young" area of investigation, aging research lacks the unifying conceptual frameworks...

Circulating Growth Differentiation Factors 11 and 8 (GDF11/8) exist in both latent and active forms, and it is unclear if specific forms can predict disease outcomes. Our data suggest that a dual-specific aptamer selectively binds GDF11/8 after prodomain activation. In 11,609 patients at risk for future cardiovascular events, low dual-specific aptamer-detected GDF11/8 levels strongly predicted adverse outcomes, including cardiovascular events (HR = 0.43, p = 9.1 × 10⁻⁶³) and all-cause mortality...

The pursuit of understanding early genetic or protein markers for ovarian aging has garnered considerable attention in the realm of reproductive medicine. Sirtuins (SIRTs) are a group of proteins that are NAD^(+)-dependent, and thanks to their properties, they are able to change the acetylation profile of proteins and post-translationally modify their functions, too. Previous research provided evidence that SIRTs influence fibrosis levels in several organs. With regard to ovaries, fibrosis is...