Forever Young Means...You Can Publish More Papers

Reporting in Nature Medicine, researchers at Yeshiva University have used transgenic mice to turn on a process that helps keep the liver of older mice young and healthy. Using a double transgenic mouse model that could be modulated to selectively increase the number of receptors for damaged proteins, they found that the process of chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA) could be controlled to allow mice to continuously degrade and recycle proteins that accumulate with old age. Functionally, this could have significance for diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, they say. "It's not often you see studies where they have managed to improve function in this way," says Thomas von Zglinicki, Professor of Cellular Gerontology at Newcastle University, in a BBC article.