Cognitive Labs

Gradually spreading throughout the world's oceans, Turritopsis, a tiny 5 mm creature has developed a unique response to physical stress. When conditions become bleak enough, either through injury, starvation, or environmental alteration and end of life is faced, a unique transformational process ensues. It is not known why most specimens, in the absence of extraordinary stress, simply die like other species.

Essentially, in those cases where excessive stress is accumulated by the organism, a process is triggered where its cells are empowered to convert themselves from one organizing form to another. Muscle cells may become nerve cells or even sperm or egg cells. The jellyfish turns itself into a bloblike cyst, which then develops into a polyp colony, essentially the first stage in jellyfish life.

Through asexual reproduction, the resulting polyp colony can spawn hundreds of genetically identical jellyfish, near perfect copies of the original adult.

This unique approach to hardship may be helping Turritopsis swarms spread throughout the world's oceans, according to Pia Miglietta, a researcher at Penn State.

The unique cellular conversion process of Turritopsis may offer potential to anti-aging researchers searching for chemical compounds and transmitters that can transform the aging process by neutralizing free radicals, possibly sweeping away lacunae and bugs in repetitively replicated DNA code (bad code leads to flawed cells as we age) and instigating cellular genesis. It seems to be an organism that can turn back the clock, literally morphing from an adult into a newborn state.

Article at Nationalgeographic.com

Labels: antioxidant, dna, free_radical, miglietta, penn_state, turritopsis

Jacob Israel Avedon, photo by Richard Avedon

Why does aging occur? This question was recently asked in a descriptive piece in the New Yorker.

Aging really can be defined as molecular change (see article) mitigated by time. Others, for example, longevity researcher Aubrey DeGrey, posit a free-radical theory of human decline.

In something of a counterpoint, according to Dr. Ashford, a Stanford/VA scientist, "The problem is a species adaptation to an ecological niche with evolution occurring at all system levels of the organism including the social interactions between members of the species during the adaptation."

"Evolution and adaptation is ever continuing and may lead to a longer life for the organisms of the species, but it takes a long time. I think free-radicals are just part of life, carefully adapted into the living process, and you can’t just treat this molecular mechanism or any other one and expect to live forever. Look what happened to Roy Walford, the starvation for aging man, who ended up dying of leukemia at a younger age than his normal life-expectancy."

Labels: aging, alzheimers, free_radical