Aging is an inevitable process that effects every cell, tissue, and organ in your body. You can live longer by maintaining a healthy, active lifestyle, but there is no magic pill that can prevent your body’s natural processes from slowly breaking down and becoming less efficient. As author Chinua Achebe would say, “Things Fall Apart”.

Adult stem cells are an unfortunate victim of the aging process. They have the important job of replenishing the cells in your body throughout your lifetime. However, as you grow older, adult stem cells lose their regenerative ability and fail to maintain the integrity and function of their tissues and organs. This can happen for a number of reasons, but no matter the cause, dysfunctional stem cells can accelerate aging and contribute to a shortened lifespan.

So to put it simply, aging adult stem cells = decline in stem cell function = shortened lifespan.

Dysfunctional blood stem cells make an unhappy immune system

A good example of this process is hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), which are adult stem cells found in bone marrow that make all the cells in our blood and immune system. When HSCs get old, they lose their edge and fail to generate some of the important blood cell types that are crucial for a healthy immune system. This can be life-threatening for elderly people who are at higher risk for infections and disease.

So how can we improve the function of aging HSCs to boost the immune system in older people and potentially extend their healthy years of life? A team of researchers from Germany might have an answer. They’ve identified a genetic switch that revitalizes aged, defective HSCs in mice and prolongs their lifespan. They published their findings this week in Nature Cell Biology.

Identifying the Per-petrator for aging HSCs

The perpetrator in this story is a gene called Per2. The team identified Per2 through a genetic screen of hundreds of potential tumor suppressor genes that could potentially impair the regenerative abilities of HSCs in response to DNA damage caused by aging.

It turns out that the Per2 gene is turned on in a subset of HSCs, called lymphoid-HSCs, that preferentially generate blood cells in the lymphatic system. These include B and T cells, both important parts of our immune system. When Per2 is turned on in lymphoid-HSCs, it activates the DNA damage response pathway. While responding to DNA damage may sound like a good thing, it also slows down the cell division process and prevents lymphoid-HSCs from producing their normal amount of lymphoid cells. Adding insult to injury, Per2 also activates the p53-dependent apoptosis pathway, which causes programmed cell death and further reduces the number of HSCs in reserve.

To address these problems, the team decided to delete the Per2 gene in mice and study the function of their HSCs as they aged. They found that removing Per2 stabilized lymphoid-HSCs and rescued their ability to generate the appropriate number of lymphoid cells. Per2 deletion also boosted their immune system, making the mice less susceptible to infection, and extended their lifespan by as much as 15 percent.

A key finding was that deleting Per2 did not increase the incidence of tumors in the aging mice – a logical concern as Per2 mutations in humans are link to increased cancer risk.

Per2 might not be a Per-fect solution for healthy aging

In summary, getting rid of Per2 in the HSCs of older mice improves their function and the function of their immune system while also extending their lifespan.

Senior author on the study, Karl Lenhard Rudolph, commented about their findings in a news release:

Karl Lenhard Rudolph.

“All in all, these results are very promising, but equally surprising. We did not expect such a strong connection between switching off a single gene and improving the immune system so clearly.”

 

 

So Per2 may be a good healthy aging target in mice, but the real question is whether these results will translate to humans. Per2 is a circadian rhythm gene and is important for regulating the sleep-wake cycle. Deleting this gene in humans could cause sleep disorders and other unwanted side effects.

Rudolph acknowledges that his team needs to move their focus from mouse to humans.

“It is not yet clear whether this mutation in humans would have a benefit such as improved immune functions in aging — it is of great interest for us to further investigate this question.”