A recent scientific study of the University College London (UCL), revealed that worm milk could be the key to delaying human agingas it contains several substances that provide special nutrients.
The discovery was published in the magazine Nature Communications, where they explain that when mother worms secrete a fluid down her vulva, similar to milk, their young are fed to grow, in a process that works as a type of suicide.
“It is both a form of primitive lactation, which has only been shown to do some other invertebrates, as a form of reproductive suicide, since the mothers of worms are sacrificed to support the next generation ”, they point out.
In the study, the scientists put the earthworm under the microscope Caenorhabditis elegans, which has been the object of study on several occasions, to understand how worms age and their behavior.
Most of these worms are round, transparent one millimeter long, they have female and male reproductive organs, so they reproduce by self-fertilizing with limited reserves of sperm. A few days after reaching sexual maturity, its reserve is exhausted and production ceases.
“Now we have explained a self-destructive process the only one observed in the nematode worms”Added Professor David Gems, head of the UCL study.
In this way, having reached their peak, the worms do a disinterested act in favor of their young, since they begin to consume their own organs to produce the milk that their young take to grow.
They also lay more than their own body weight in unfertilized eggs. Scientists previously assumed that these changes were useless and represented some form of the disease of old age.
Carina Kern, doctor of the UCL Institute for Healthy Aging and one of the study’s co-authors explained: “Once we realized that post-reproductive worms were producing milk, many things suddenly made sense. The worms are destroying themselves in the process of transfer nutrients to their offspring. And all those unfertilized eggs are filled with milk, so they act like milk bottles to help transport the milk to feed the baby worms. “
Previously the scientists of that laboratory had shown that the production of yolk in old age is a self-destructive process. The worms called long-lived mutants have also been intensively studied to understand their aging, related to the production of the aforementioned liquid and their unfertilized eggs.
However, in the new study, the researchers found that the so-called milk seems to benefit the larvae, since they found evidence that the young worms were ingesting the worm’s milk, as well as those that had access to yolk milk grew more rapidly.
Kern added: “The existence of worm’s milk reveals a new way that C. elegans maximizes their evolutionary aptitude: when they can no longer reproduce because they have run out of sperm, they melt their own tissues to transfer resources to their offspring ”.
Scientists’ discovery of self-destructive reproduction could have implications for halting human aging.
“The surprising thing about the aging of C. elegans the thing is genetic manipulation can dramatically increase lifespan, up to ten times. This suggests that, By understanding how this happens, the key to slowing human aging could be found, which is really exciting. But if the life span of C. elegans is simply due to the suppression of suicidal reproduction as in salmon, then the possibility of applying our knowledge of worm aging to dramatically extend human life suddenly seems remote, ”Professor Gems noted.
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