ISTOCK, DR_MICROBEAcross mammalian species, pancreatic cell size correlates with lifespan, according to research published on today (June 18) in Developmental Cell.
Yuval Dor, a developmental biologist at the Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada and the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem, and colleagues were observing pancreatic cells from mice when they came across something intriguing. They needed a higher magnification to look at pancreatic cells of infant mice compared with those of adult mice—meaning the cells grew in size. “This was surprising because the assumption was that postnatally, the pancreas grows by increasing the number of cells just like most organs that we think about,” Yuval Dor, a developmental biologist and coauthor on the study, says in a statement. Examining human pancreatic cells revealed a different pattern: they did not grow in size but multiplied in number, meaning the adult cell size was relatively small, no ...
