Bioengineering Graduate Program, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA.
Department of Physics, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA.
Sci Rep. 2017 Jul 11;7(1):5051. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-05098-2.
Aging remains a fundamental open problem in modern biology. Although there exist a number of theories on aging on the cellular scale, nearly nothing is known about how microscopic failures cascade to macroscopic failures of tissues, organs and ultimately the organism. The goal of this work is to bridge microscopic cell failure to macroscopic manifestations of aging. We use tissue engineered constructs to control the cellular-level damage and cell-cell distance in individual tissues to establish the role of complex interdependence and interactions between cells in aging tissues. We found that while microscopic mechanisms drive aging, the interdependency between cells plays a major role in tissue death, providing evidence on how cellular aging is connected to its higher systemic consequences.
衰老是现代生物学中的一个基本开放性问题。尽管在细胞水平上存在许多关于衰老的理论，但几乎没有人知道微观故障如何级联到组织、器官甚至整个生物体的宏观故障。这项工作的目标是将微观细胞衰竭与衰老的宏观表现联系起来。我们使用组织工程构建体来控制单个组织中细胞水平的损伤和细胞间距离，以确定细胞间复杂的相互依存和相互作用在衰老组织中的作用。我们发现，虽然微观机制驱动衰老，但细胞间的相互依存关系在组织死亡中起着重要作用，为细胞衰老如何与其更高的系统后果联系起来提供了证据。
