Thanks Baltimorebullet for the fascinating article on another role of the mitochondria. Might Blarcamesine positively influence these process of the mitochondria also? Developmental growth & aging? The S1 programmatic platform Anavex is developing continues to look to have far-reaching potential. ToeMind
Quote: " “Pretty much everything we looked at so far is scaling,” Pourquié said, “which means that there is a global command for all these processes.” The Tick-Tock of Metabolism
What could this upstream control system be? Pourquié and Diaz Cuadros pondered which system could potentially affect a variety of cellular processes — and they landed on metabolism, driven by mitochondria. Mitochondria produce ATP, the energy currency of the cell, as well as a host of metabolites essential for building proteins and DNA, regulating the genome, and performing other critical processes.
Somewhere in their genome, there has to be a sequence difference between mouse and human that is encoding that difference in developmental rate.
Margarete Diaz Cuadros, Massachusetts General Hospital To test that idea, they devised genetic and pharmacological methods to speed up and then slow down the metabolic rates of their stem cells. If mitochondria were indeed setting the cellular tempo, they expected to see their experiments alter the rhythm of the segmentation clock.
When they slowed metabolism in human cells, the segmentation clock slowed too: Its period stretched from five to seven hours, and the rate of protein synthesis slowed as well. And when they sped metabolism up, the clock’s oscillations accelerated, too.
It was as if they had discovered the tuning knob of the cell’s internal metronome, which let them accelerate or decelerate the tempo of embryonic development. “It’s not differences in the gene regulatory architecture that explains these differences in timing,” Pourquié said. The findings were published in Nature earlier this year.
This metabolic tuning knob wasn’t limited to the developing embryo. Iwata and Vanderhaeghen, meanwhile, figured out how to use drugs and genetics to toy with the metabolic tempo of maturing neurons — a process that, unlike that of the segmentation clock, which runs for only a couple of days, takes many weeks or months. When mouse neurons were compelled to generate energy more slowly, the neurons matured more slowly, too. Conversely, by pharmacologically shifting human neurons toward a faster pathway, the researchers could accelerate their maturation. The findings were published in Science in January.
To Vanderhaeghen, the conclusion of their experiments is clear: “Metabolic rate is driving developmental timing.”
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