Scientists are focusing on the microscopic powerhouses energizing our cells.
In a study published this week in the journal Nature Aging, researchers at Buck Institute in California discovered a natural compound that makes our cellular recycling and waste management system work better. Called mitophagy-inducing coumarin (or MIC for short), this compound extended the lifespan of Caenorhabditis elegans, a worm commonly used as a model organism in scientific studies because of how easy they are to work with and observe. MIC did so by encouraging the worm’s cells to clear out old and damaged mitochondria — a process called mitophagy that naturally tends to decline as we age.
“There’s a bottleneck in efforts to develop potential therapeutics in the field of [the study of aging], and the bottleneck is that we don’t have enough molecules in the pipeline,” Gordon Lithgow, one of the study’s authors and a professor at Buck Institute, said in a press release. “MIC is a great candidate to bring forward given its therapeutic effect across multiple models and the fact that it is a naturally occurring molecule.” READ MORE FROM INVERSE
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