Aging Influences Nucleolar Responses To Traumatic Brain Injury In Drosophila
Our brains are incredibly complex, and understanding how they respond to injury, especially as we age, is a major challenge. Recent research using fruit flies, a common model in scientific studies, sheds light on how brain cells react to trauma. It turns out that a part of our cells called the nucleolus, which is crucial for making proteins, changes significantly after a brain injury.
In young flies, a brain injury leads to a rapid increase in the size of these nucleoli, and this enlargement can last for weeks. Interestingly, older flies don’t show this same response; their nucleoli don’t get bigger after an injury. This suggests that the way our cells respond to trauma changes with age. The study also found that both aging and brain injury increase the variability in nucleolar size among cells.
Crucially, the researchers discovered that by blocking a specific cellular pathway, known as the TOR signaling pathway, they could reduce the number of young flies that died shortly after a brain injury. This pathway is known to regulate nucleolar size, and its inhibition suggests that the enlargement of nucleoli might actually contribute to the damage caused by brain injuries. These findings indicate that brain injury might accelerate some of the cellular changes typically associated with aging and highlight a potential new target for developing treatments to improve recovery after brain trauma.
Source: link to paper