WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, CANDIDA PERFORMA
Scientists studying mice genetically engineered to lack an anti-inflammatory factor have stumbled upon an unexpected secondary function for the protein—it slows down aging. The surprising discovery, which is reported online today (May 24) in Molecular Cell, has implications for inflammatory and age-related diseases, but also for cancer.
“We were [shocked], to put it mildly,” said Robert Schneider of New York University, who led the study. “This is certainly not something anybody would have ever anticipated.”
Schneider and his team had been analyzing mice that lacked a protein called AUF1 and they'd shown that it was critical for binding to and degrading mRNA transcripts encoding inflammatory proteins. But besides having a dampened inflammatory response, mice lacking AUF1 displayed some unusual characteristics.
“We noticed that they aged ...
