Scottish geneticists have found in human DNA a kind of brain aging program that controls its development throughout life and is associated with the development of schizophrenia. This is stated in an article published in the magazine eLife.
“The discovery of this genetic program has opened a completely new way to study how human behavior changes and how often various brain diseases affect him at different stages of life. The end result of all this research could be the creation of drugs that change the course of brain aging,”said Seth Grant, a geneticist at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
In recent years, scientists have again begun to argue about what the process of aging and death of humans and animals is. Some biologists and evolutionists believe that this process is not accidental and that it is controlled by a kind of "death program" - a certain set of genes that make the body grow decrepit and die, and thus give way to a new generation of their own kind.
Trying to understand whether this is really so, American geneticists have recently discovered a whole set of genes potentially associated with the work of this "aging program". Disruptions in the functioning of these genes may explain why some people, as well as African rodents - naked mole rats - live several decades longer than other related species.
Relatively recently, scientists discovered a special zone in the brain of mice that controls the aging of the brain and the whole organism as a whole, but the very principles of its work remained at that time a mystery to biologists.
Grant and his colleagues took the first step towards uncovering the mechanisms of the brain aging program by analyzing which genes are active in neurons and accessory cells of the nervous system at different stages of life.
To do this, geneticists had to analyze a huge array of data and experimental results accumulated over the past three decades, and isolate those genes associated with the work of the brain, whose level of activity changed in childhood, maturity and old age.
The fruit of this search was the discovery of several dozen genes and short RNA molecules, the main carriers of information inside cells, the functioning of which changes greatly during the onset of maturity and old age.
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These changes, as scientists note, affect not only neurons, but also cells of glia and other auxiliary tissues of the brain, and most of them begin at the age of 26-30. At this time, as scientists note, there is a serious restructuring of the brain, and many of its departments and types of cells begin to work differently than in adolescence and childhood. These changes begin to occur earlier in the brains of men, indicating that the brains of women are aging more slowly. Similar changes occur, as shown by the observations of the authors of the article, and in the brains of mice, of course, adjusted for the difference in lifespan of humans and rodents.
This nature of the brain aging program, as noted by geneticists, may explain why schizophrenia most often affects young people aged 25-30. Disruptions in its functioning associated with malfunctions in the genes encoding this program can cause serious disturbances in the functioning of the nervous system and give rise to "voices in the head" and other characteristic features of this disease.
For example, the work of the genes Atp2a2, Eef2, and Itpr1, which are associated with the development of Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia, are particularly affected by the onset of maturity. Finding the pieces of DNA that code for the program that controls all of these genes could not only help find a way to cure schizophrenia, but also slow down the aging process in the brain.