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The challenge of identifying senescent cells

Nature Cell Biology volume 25, pages 1554–1556 (2023)Cite this article

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Reliable ways to identify senescent cells represent a bottleneck for understanding the roles of senescence in physiology and disease. This Comment examines the challenges of identifying senescent cells, revises existing recommendations for how to best assess senescence and discusses how emerging technologies can address these issues.

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Fig. 1: Cellular senescence and existing recommendations for detecting it.
Fig. 2: Alternative methodologies for detecting senescence.

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Acknowledgements

I thank the reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions, and apologize to the authors whose work could not be cited because of space limitations. Core support from the MRC (MC_U120085810) and a grant from Cancer Research UK (C15075/A28647) funded research in the J.G. laboratory.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS), London, UK

    Jesús Gil

  2. Institute of Clinical Sciences (ICS), Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, UK

    Jesús Gil

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  1. Jesús Gil
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Correspondence to Jesús Gil.

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Competing interests

J.G. has acted as a consultant for Unity Biotechnology, Geras Bio, Myricx Pharma Ltd and Merck KGaA. J.G. owns equity in Geras Bio and share options in Myricx Pharma Ltd, and is a named inventor in UK Medical Research Council (MRC) and Imperial College patents related to senolytic therapies. J.G.’s laboratory receives research funding from Pfizer at present. Unity Biotechnology funded research on senolytics in J.G.’s laboratory in the past.

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Nature Cell Biology thanks Rugang Zhang, Cleo Bishop and Valery Krizhanovsky for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Gil, J. The challenge of identifying senescent cells. Nat Cell Biol 25, 1554–1556 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41556-023-01267-w

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