Volume 2 Issue 6, June 2022

Compromised clearance of dysfunctional mitochondria, through the process of mitophagy, has garnered attention as an essential contributor to aging and neurodegeneration. Schmid and colleagues¹ reveal that genetic enhancement of mitophagy via neuronal overexpression of BNIP3 alleviates brain aging and prolongs healthspan in fruit flies.

Tau neuropathology is a defining feature of Alzheimer’s disease. For decades, its progression throughout the cortex has been captured post mortem using Braak stages. A new study replicated Braak staging in living patients using positron emission tomography, showing associations with other biomarkers and clinical deficits.

Transcription factors can control cell identity and function in health and disease. However, how they do so during aging is incompletely explored. Maity and colleagues identify age-related changes in gene regulation by analyzing the expression patterns of transcription-factor target genes in single-cell transcriptomics data.

High-affinity tau-PET was used to apply the Braak neuropathological staging system for Alzheimer’s disease in vivo. Tau-PET can be used to stage Alzheimer’s disease from presymptomatic to clinical dementia phases in people, while also providing a framework to model the natural history of Alzheimer’s disease using biomarkers.

Older adults from long-term care facilities who had been infected with COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic were found to have robust cellular and humoral responses to SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Importantly, serostatus did not affect humoral immunity to influenza or other respiratory syncytial viruses.

Whether and how cognitive training may be used to improve cognitive functions in older age remains incompletely explored, and existing studies have yielded inconsistent results. Here, the authors argue that emerging technologies can transform the field of cognitive enhancement by enabling personalized strategies for cognitive enhancement in older adults.

Epigenetic clocks can measure biological aging, but the relationship between epigenetic age and other hallmarks of aging is incompletely understood. Here the authors show that epigenetic age is associated with nutrient sensing, mitochondria activity and stem cell depletion but distinct from cellular senescence, telomere attrition and genomic instability.

This study shows that the cellular pathway that removes dysfunctional mitochondria, mitophagy, becomes impaired in the aged fly brain. Inducing mitophagy in the aging brain prolongs health and lifespan, while slowing both muscle aging and gut aging.

Using single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, the authors identified several aging-associated and oxidized phosphatidylcholine-associated changes in microglia in the spinal cord, including an increase in osteopontin that contributed to neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation.

The authors used PET imaging to stage individuals according to the Braak neuropathological system for Alzheimer’s disease. PET stage was associated with biomarker and cognitive changes, highlighting the potential to stage Alzheimer’s disease in living people.

This study shows that during the first wave of SARS-CoV-2 infection in England, residents of long-term care facilities who survived infection developed a robust and stable immunity against the virus that did not negatively impact responses to other seasonal viruses.

Transcription factors control cell identity and function in health, disease and aging. Here the authors identify age-associated changes of transcriptional regulatory networks in single cells, revealing cell-type and tissue-type-independent patterns in key pathways, including circadian rhythm, antigen processing, collagen processing and inflammation.