The Thing Inside Your Cells That Might Determine How Long You Live
You may have forgotten about the nucleolus since you took biology class, but scientists think this structure inside every cell in your body may play an important role in aging.
by JoAnna Klein / NY Times
Once there was a mutant worm in an experiment. It lived for 46 days. This was much longer than the oldest normal worm, which lived just 22.
Researchers identified the mutated gene that had lengthened the worm’s life, which led to a breakthrough in the study of aging, it seemed to be controlled by metabolic processes. Later, as researchers studied these processes, all signs seemed to point to the nucleolus.
Learn More About The Nucleolus
Under a microscope, it’s hard to miss. Take just about any cell, find the nucleus, then look inside it for a dark, little blob. That’s the nucleolus. If the cell were an eyeball, you’d be looking at its pupil.
You’ve got one in every nucleus of every cell in your body, too. All animals do. So do plants, and yeast, and anything with a cell with a nucleus. And they’ve become much more important in our understanding of how cells work.
“We think the nucleolus plays an important role in regulating the life span of animals,” said Adam Antebi, a cellular biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Germany. He’s an author of a new review published last week in Trends in Cell Biology that examines all the new ways that researchers have fallen in love with the nucleolus, especially its role in aging.
Image above © Jose Calvo / Science Source
