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Posted by Shameen
Nov. 29, 2018, 4:09 pm EST
Health
New York: Researchers have found that antibiotic minocycline can prolong the life of older roundworms by preventing protein build-up, revealing a protective mechanism that can help prevent age-related neurodegenerative diseases of the man.
Protein aggregation is known to cause several age-related progressive brain diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and prion disease.
The study, led by a team from Scripps Research in the United States, showed that minocycline prevents this accumulation, even in older animals with age-altered stress response pathways.
The number of proteins in a cell is balanced by the rate of manufacture and elimination of proteins, called proteostasis. As you get older, the proteostasis becomes impaired.
"We have identified minocycline as a drug that can extend the shelf life and improve the protein balance in already aging worms," said Michael Petrascheck, badociate professor at Scripps Research.
"Our study reveals how minocycline prevents protein aggregation and lays the groundwork for drug development efforts to optimize this already approved drug for a broad range of neurodegenerative diseases."
For the study, reported in the eLife journal, the team first tested 21 different molecules known to extend the life span of young and old worms of Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans).
They found that all these molecules prolonged the lives of young worms; However, the only drug effective against older worms was minocycline.
To find out why, they treated young and old worms with water or minocycline and then measured two proteins called syn-synuclein and amyloid-ß-known to accumulate in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. .
Regardless of worm age, those treated with minocycline had a reduced aggregation of both proteins as they aged without the stress responses being activated.
This is because minocycline directly affects the protein production mechanism of the cell, called ribosome. This was true for both worms and mice and human cells, the researchers said.
Source: IANS
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