Stem Cells & Telemore lengths & Mitochondrial DNA

[DreamScourge]

Hi

I am trying to find information on what sort of research, if any, has been carried out into stem cell treatments/experiments, specifically relating to telomere length and the condition of the mitochondrial DNA in the new cells.

What effects do these treatments/experiments have on the age of the new group of cells?

Are any changes permanent?

Are there any differences when using cells harvested from adults or embryonic stem cells?

When using adult stem cells do the cultured cells have the age properties of normal cells in the adult specimen?

The internet is a wonderful medium, but for every useful result on a search there seems to be a hundred or more useless results, this seems to become more of a problem the larger the internet grows, so any help that you can give pointing me in the right direction, or suggestions on where to look would be most useful.

Many Thanks.

[G-Do]

I don't know about mitochondrial DNA, but telomere length/stability is something people have looked at. One of the more interesting treatments people have tried is oxidative stress - this kind of stress increases the concentration of oxygen radicals in the cell, which causes DNA damage (double-stranded breaks). If the cell is stressed enough, it will enter senescence (the cellular dormancy associated with old age) prematurely.

There are two papers you could skim over to see if you're interested:

Torella D, Rota M, Nurzynska D, Musso E, Monsen A, Shiraishi I, Zias E, Walsh K, Rosenzweig A, Sussman MA, Urbanek K, Nadal-Ginard B, Kajstura J, Anversa P, Leri A. Cardiac stem cell and myocyte aging, heart failure, and insulin-like growth factor-1 overexpression. Circ Res. 2004 Mar 5;94(4):514-24.

Kamminga LM, de Haan G. Cellular memory and hematopoietic stem cell aging. Stem Cells. 2006 May;24(5):1143-9.

Hope that helps!

[LilKim]

have you tried pubmed?

http://www.pubmed.com

[G-Do]

Actually, a paper just came out in Nature about the effect of the checkpoint protein p16 on stem cell ageing.

Janzen, Forkert, Fleming, Saito, Waring, Dombkowski, Cheng, DiPinho, Sharpless, Scadden. Stem-cell ageing modified by the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p16INK4a. Nature. 2006:443, pp421-426.

(Can't get the INK4a to be superscripted; apparently this forum doesn't let you embed HTML).

A whole bunch of other p16 papers came out in Nature in September as well, along with a small note by Judy Campisi on the whole subject.