Chaos in ageing skeletal muscle stem cells

Faithful to the Pasteurian mission that aims to tackle human public health issues, the Institut Pasteur is involved in research on ageing. Seeking understand the decline in function of tissues in organisms, researchers from the Stem Cells and Development unit at Institut Pasteur made a discovery on the still unknown mechanisms of the epigenetic clock in stem cells.

Epigenetic modifications have been proposed as a major cause of age-related tissue degradation. Among them is a particular modification called "methylation of DNA". Age-predictive models, based on epigenetics and also known as epigenetic clocks, have been widely applied in recent years and have been reported to reflect chronological aging. Despite these correlations, the mechanisms underlying these models remain largely unknown. For this reason, the team of Shahragim Tajbakhsh from Institut Pasteur, in collaboration with the team of Wolf Reik at the Babraham (UK) tried to decipher the relationships between epigenetic regulation of DNA and ageing muscle stem cells.

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