Does Reproductive System Affect Human Aging?
New research by Brown University biologists shows that fruit flies live longer when they dont produce germline stem cells the cells that create eggs and sperm. The work suggests a provocative general principle at work: Signals from reproductive tissue directly control lifespan and metabolism in the whole organism. The work, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also offers a first glimpse of how this control in the fly might occur at the molecular level. For more than 50 years, scientists have known that there is a link between reproduction and lifespan, said Thomas Flatt, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown and the lead author of the research article. When reproduction is delayed, animals live longer. Why? Our research suggests that signals from the reproductive system can regulate aging in animals including, possibly, humans. The Brown findings follow a seminal discovery made 10 years ago by
