More Protein Aggregation Research
An open access paper on one of the causes of aging: "In neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease and Huntington's disease, specific proteins escape the cell's quality-control system and associate together, forming insoluble aggregates. Until now, little was known about whether proteins aggregate in a non-disease context. In this study, we discovered that the aging process itself, in the absence of disease, leads to the insolubilization and increased aggregation propensity of several hundred proteins in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. ... We asked if this inherent age-dependent protein aggregation impacts neurodegenerative diseases. We found that proteins similar to those aggregating in old worms have also been identified as minor components of human disease aggregates. In addition, we showed that higher levels of inherent protein aggregation aggravated toxicity in a C. elegans Huntington's disease model. Inherent protein aggregation is a new biomarker of aging. Understanding how to modulate it will lead to important insights into the mechanisms that underlie aging and protein aggregation diseases."