Senescent cells stop producing nucleotides: new research
&gt; The research team discovered that the aging, senescent cells stopped producing a class of chemicals called nucleotides, which are the building blocks of DNA. When they took young cells and forced them to stop producing nucleotides, they became senescent, or aged.<p>^ From the article.  Yet, when I check the linked journal entry:<p>&gt; Inhibition of nucleotide synthesis promotes replicative senescence of human mammary epithelial cells<p>^ journal article title, which seems somewhat the reverse of the article claim.<p>&gt; To test whether cellular immortalization would reverse these observations, we expressed telomerase in HMECs. In addition to preventing senescence, telomerase expression maintained metabolic flux from glucose into nucleotide synthesis pathways. Finally, we investigated whether inhibition of nucleotide synthesis in proliferating HMECs is sufficient to induce senescence.<p>^ From the journal article abstract.  This states NONE of the &quot;took young cells and...&quot; claims from the article, but rather the opposite.<p>&gt; Taken together, our results suggest that nucleotide synthesis inhibition plays a causative role in the establishment of replicative senescence in HMECs.<p>Umm...unless I&#x27;m missing something, this is literally taking correlation and determining causation.<p>TL;DR: This looks like an exploratory data point in the &quot;how does the telomere clock actually cause senescence in a cell&quot;.  While this COULD lead to some &quot;new&quot; treatment, vast issues remain, including both &quot;is this the sole cause&quot;, &quot;is this actually relevant&quot;, and &quot;if this is the Big Cause, what could we do about it anyway?&quot;