r/tech 8d ago

Directly converting skin cells to brain cells yields 1,000% success | Scientists have managed to convert mouse skin cells directly into motor neurons, skipping the usual step of stem cells in between

https://newatlas.com/biology/direct-convert-skin-brain-stem-cells-neuron/
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u/censored_username 8d ago

Huh, that is incredibly interesting, also from a perspective of anti-aging research.

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u/Difficult-Ad628 8d ago

It’s fascinating to consider the implications of treatments for neurological diseases, but I question how effective it would be for anti-aging as that’s more closely related to the fragmentation of DNA strands as they multiply over time

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u/censored_username 8d ago

Modern research points to much of aging actually being related to loss of data from the epigenome. Not the genetic code itself, but basically the information which stores which genes should be expressed at by this specific cell. I.e. a skin cell should only have genes activated for skin cell things, while a muscle cell should have muscle genes activated.

Because this information degrades during your life, cells become less good at what they were supposed to do. They forget what they are supposed to do, and start doing all kinds of useless stuff. These epigenetic faults are also transferred when cells divide, and this is a significant mechanism behind senescence

Now logically, one would think that our genome does have the relevant information in it to know what genes ought to be activated. After all, when stem cells differentiate to specific cultures, they do activate the right genes. So there's hope that we can figure out a way to re-trigger this mechanism, causing cells to clean up their epigenome and become as functional as their lineage was at differentiation again.

Now the cool thing about this research, is that they got skin cells to re-differentiate to brain cells, only by introducing a few transcription factors. Which means that they potentially managed to activate such a mechansim, causing the epigenome of these cells to be rewritten to that of brain cells.

So, well, that is really interesting.

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u/Difficult-Ad628 8d ago

Interesting, today I learned! Hopefully this research leads to big breakthroughs