Old age is plagued with health complaints, from aches and pains to heart and neurodegenerative diseases. Some scientists have postulated that interfering with aging at the cellular level could delay or even prevent many of these ailments, which has led to an explosion of research on anti-aging.
Now, researchers from Peking University in China claim that human coilin-interacting nuclear ATPase protein (hCINAP) can do exactly that: prevent cellular senescence and, potentially, delay aging. Overexpressing the protein in worm models delayed cellular senescence—a period characterized by the absence of growth in cells—and depleting it increased senescence in human and mouse cell lines, they report March 6 in Journal of Molecular Cell Biology.
James Kirkland, a physician-scientist at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota who carries out clinical trials on drugs that target fundamental aging processes, says that the findings are a very valuable addition to what is already known about senescent cells. However, ...
