Defining immortality of stem cells to identify novel anti-aging mechanisms
The survival of an organism is linked to its ability to maintain the quality of the cellular proteins. A group of proteins called chaperones facilitate the folding of proteins and are essential to regulating the quality of the cellular protein content. This ability declines during the aging process, inducing the accumulation of damaged and misfolded proteins that can lead to cell death or malfunction. Several neurodegenerative age-related disorders such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or Huntington's diseas e are linked to a decline in protein quality control. Human pluripotent stem cells can replicate indefinitely while maintaining their undifferentiated state and, therefore, are immortal in culture. This capacity necessarily demands avoidance of any imbalance in the integrity of their protein content. "There is one chaperone system, the TRiC/CCT-complex that is responsible for folding about 10% of all the cellular proteins. By studying how pluripotent stem cells mai...