Hunger rejuvenates stem cells. Free Technical Library News

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Hunger rejuvenates stem cells

12.05.2018

Stem cells, as you know, can divide for a very long time, while some of them remain, as before, stem cells, and some turn into some specialized cells that perform certain functions. It is stem cells that renew our tissues, replacing old and dead cells with new ones. But over time, stem cells lose the ability to divide endlessly - like the rest of the body, they also age and their supply gradually decreases, which cannot but affect the state of organs that can no longer be renewed.

Stem cells can be rejuvenated if they are allowed to starve. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology experimented with mouse intestinal stem cells, whose job is to renew the epithelial lining of the intestinal wall. (This epithelium wears out quite quickly - in five days, stem cells completely change it.)

After old mice were kept starving for a day, stem cells were taken from their intestines and forced to form a "mini-intestine" - a tiny organelle that mimics a piece of a real intestine. Several types of cells should have appeared in the "mini-intestine", forming Lieberkün, or intestinal, crypts - tubular recesses of the epithelium, seated with cells capable of secreting mucus, hormones, capable of absorbing nutrients, etc.

Obviously, to make such a mini-organ, stem cells had to work very hard. And with the help of the "mini-intestine" it was possible to establish that hunger doubles the regenerative abilities of stem cells, which, after starving, more actively divided and more actively turned into other cells. It can be said that hunger rejuvenated old stem cells; however, cells taken from young animals also began to work better from hunger.

The researchers managed to find out how the metabolism changes in starving cells: they stop using carbohydrates as an energy source, starting to break down fatty acids intensively (at the same time, the genes responsible for fat metabolism are activated in them). It is the active breakdown of fatty acids that helps restore the "stem" abilities of cells - if they are artificially forbidden to extract energy in this way, then no hunger will help them. At the same time, if the cells are given a substance that can activate the genes for fat metabolism, then the cells rejuvenate without starvation. That is, the whole point is to turn on the necessary energy reactions, and it doesn’t matter how exactly we turn them on.

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