Environmental challenges may impact on somatic repair
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Evolutionary Studies, Human-Computer Interaction, Coupled Natural and Human Systems
- Keywords
- Germ line, Somatic repairs, Indispensable soma hypothesis, Environment, Apoptosis, Transposons, Trade-offs, MIcroRNAs, Germ line to soma cross-talk, Immortalisation
- Copyright
- © 2015 Kyriazis
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Environmental challenges may impact on somatic repair. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1560v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1560v1
Abstract
During the process of ageing there is canalisation of repair resources which tend to flow from the soma towards the germ line. In the early periods of phylogenetic development there was a time when repair of germ line cells became more efficient compared to the repair of somatic cells. The level of somatic repair became just enough to ensure that the organism reached sexual maturity. It was the biological equivalent of the mathematical bifurcation, when the pathway developed preferentially towards the germ line attractor. We are now looking for evidence that this could be changing, that we may be witnessing a phase transition from effective germ line repair to an effective somatic repair. Here I consider mechanisms of fidelity-preservation which may be present in the germ line, and examine the possibility that these may be made to operate upon somatic cells instead. Mechanisms which safeguard the reliability of germ line repair and ensuring robustness/resilience in the germ line may also (or instead) be applicable upon somatic material (cells and molecules, factors) and ensure a continually effective repair of this somatic material. Thus the ability to continually repair and maintain somatic organic material within biological systems is not lost. Continual challenges from the environment ensure that the flow of information remains active and it persistently stimulates the ability to repair the soma. Apart from germ line cells, some unicellular organisms such as bacteria maintain their ability for ongoing repairs, a fact that indicates that, in principle, senescence is not unavoidable.
Author Comment
This is one of the chapters in a book about the impact of hormesis and the environment on the biology of human ageing. It deals specifically with the notion that continual, hormetic cognitive challenges may cause a reallocation of repair resources from the germ line to the soma, thus ensuring a reduced risk of age-related dysfunction. The chapter is an unpublished draft and it can be considered together with the other chapters of the book, although it can also stand alone.