If you looked at two snapshots of the same maple tree taken in July and December, you’d see a dramatic change from summer’s full green crown to winter’s bare branches. What those two photos don’t show you, however, is how the change occurred—gradually or all at once? In truth, deciduous trees tend to hold out for an environmental signal—a change in light or temperature—and then shed all their leaves within just a week or two.
When it comes to aging, we may be more like these trees than we realized.
According to new work from Rockefeller’s Laboratory of Single-Cell Genomics and Population Dynamics, mammals follow a similar aging trajectory at the cellular level. As described in a new paper in Science, lab head Junyue Cao and his colleagues used single-cell sequencing to simultaneously scan more than 21 million cells from every major mouse organ across five stages of life. This enormous collection is now the world’s largest cellular atlas within a single study.
Leave a reply