Research worms regulate lifespan at high temperatures
C. elegans, the common research worm, not only use heat-sensing nerve cells to regulate response to hot temperatures but can also manage its aging pace because of that heat, as per a new research at the University of California, San Francisco.
This finding was reported in the online early edition of the journal Current Biology and has nullified the past assumption as to how the cold-blooded animals make response to and regulate heat.
From Sciencedaily.com:
Humans and other warm-blooded animals have a mechanism that enables us to maintain a constant temperature as our environment heats up or cools. Kenyon said most textbooks explain that worms and other ectotherms cannot do that.
“It’s true that worms don’t regulate their body temperature, but they do regulate their response to high temperature, slowing down processes that would otherwise go much faster. In fact, they even use steroid hormones to do this, just as we do to regulate our temperature,” she said, noting that this might have been a very early evolutionary link between cold- and warm-blooded animals.
C. elegans has been known to have thermosensory or heat-sensing neurons, which allow the worms to move towards temperatures they associate with food. If the “chemical reaction” theory were accurate, worms at a constant hotter temperature would age at the same fast rate, whether their thermosensory neurons perceived the heat or not.
The researchers proposed that this thermosensory system is what allows C. elegans to minimize the effect that warm temperature could have caused otherwise on the processes affecting aging that is something that warm-blooded animals do by regulating the temperature itself.
UCSF Professor Cynthia Kenyon, PhD, who was senior researcher on the paper, remarked that this system may allow the animal to sustain the maintenance of a more natural rate of aging even during hot temperatures.
Tags: aging, C. elegans, research worm, steroid, steroid hormones
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