BLT = Biomedische Laboratoriumtechnologie.
Spreker: Steven Bergmans. Taal: presentatie in het Nederlands, slides in het Engels.
Inhoud van het seminarie:
As the global population ages, the prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases continues to rise. However, our understanding of brain aging remains limited, largely due to the reliance on young animal models that fail to capture aging as a biological variable. The African turquoise killifish (Nothobranchius furzeri), with its short lifespan and conserved aging features, provides a unique opportunity to study brain aging and regeneration in a naturally aging vertebrate.
Using the human aging hallmarks as a scaffold, we characterized the aging killifish brain and retina and uncovered conserved signatures of aging, including senescence, gliosis, oxidative stress, and transcriptional dysregulation. We observed signs of neurodegeneration, particularly in the brain, alongside tissue stretching in the retina that complicates interpretation of cell loss. Injury studies revealed that while young killifish regenerate well, aged fish show impaired functional recovery. Even young fish fail to recover from more severe injuries.
Together, our data position the killifish as a powerful model to study how aging and injury affect the brain—and a promising tool to uncover new targets for neurodegenerative disease intervention.
