Okay, so what’s seen below aren’t exactly stem cells: they’re merely illustrative of this incredible breakthrough. The point is, news has broken out that scientists have successfully reversed the ageing process on stem cells. It’s like the Captain America serum! Uh no, because that included superpowers, this doesn’t. More incredible details after the jump.
Actually the science involved in these experiments on aging, carried out by the Buck Institute and the Georgia Institute of Technology, is quite simple. A paper on the research was even published in the journal Cell Cycle earlier this month.
What the scientists involved did was observe young and old stem cells to find out what differentiates either. It appears that the older the stem cells slowly lose their ability to regenerate other cells, which is why stem cells are like duct tape–they fix anything on a cellular level. (Of course, this is an oversimplified explanation.)
So yeah, ageing stem cells don’t do this job very well anymore. To reverse this trend, scientists suppressed accumulating retrotransopons and this became the key, a ‘toxic transcript’ that if removed, turns the stem cell young again.
Okay, so this is no panacea since it’s only been done in a lab. Thus, it might take a (long) while before the Buck Institute/GIT research even comes close to clinical application.
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