Whenever I’m under a lot of pressure, I daydream about a day off, where I could watch true crime shows, eat pizza in bed, and never get out of my pajamas. As often as I wish for this, at some point I realized that I don’t actually like doing it. If evening comes and I’ve spent the whole day watching tv in bed, I start to feel a little cranky, and somehow, more tired than I was before. I get stir-crazy, and crave stimulation, interaction, and the energy we feel when we’re under a little stress.
Researchers have understood this for a long time: humans need stress. Too much can be harmful, but the right dose pumps us up, activates our nervous system, and keeps our brains and bodies healthy.
It turns out, mitochondria aren’t so different from us in that way.
A new study of C. Elegans, a species of roundworm, revealed that when a mitochondria is a little stressed out, it sends out signals which stop the cell from folding protein incorrectly, or from slacking on quality control. These failures happen naturally with age, but can be mitigated by the mitochondrial signaling. The study’s findings provide insight that could help scientists learn about the molecular forces behind aging and degenerative diseases related to age, like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s disease, as well as ALS.
Not only does a somewhat stressed-out mitochondria ensure better protein folding, but it also stops damaged proteins from building up. Patients with ALS and Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s disease often experience a build up of these damaged proteins, which can lead to their degenerative symptoms.To learn more about ALS, click here and to learn more about Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease, click here and here.
This is the opposite of what we thought we knew about mitochondria. Scientists always believed that mitochondria didn’t want stress. However, they made the same discovery that I did after spending too much time in bed, eating doritos and shirking responsibility– the total absence of stress can have detrimental effects as well.
Richard Morimoto, Ph.D., the molecular bioscience professor at Northwestern who led this study, explains that this is a phenomenon that nobody has seen before. Scientists always understood that when a mitochondria was under stress for a long period of time, it had was detrimental. “When you stress mitochondria just a little, the mitochondrial stress signal is actually interpreted by the cell and animal as a survival strategy,” he explains,
“It makes the animals completely stress resistant and doubles their lifespan. It’s like magic.”
Healthy mitochondria are essential for health throughout the body, for everyone. These findings could be especially useful as researchers grapple with degenerative diseases, and start to understand the role that a mitochondria’s stress levels play.
