By Linda Wang – UCLA Health
A research team led by Dr. Thomas Rando, director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA, has discovered that restoring glutathione—a key antioxidant that prevents cell damage—rejuvenates old muscle stem cells. Muscle stem cells are activated to help repair damaged tissues after injury, so finding a way to make old muscle stem cells behave like young muscle stem cells could help improve the body’s ability to recover from injury when we get older.
The study found that with age, muscle stem cells in mice evolve from one population of cells into two distinct subpopulations of cells that differ in their glutathione metabolism. The cell population with high levels of glutathione are good at muscle repair while the population with low levels of the antioxidant do a poor job.