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🇵🇾 Paraguay /Health & Science

Body tissues adapt their cleanup capacity to metabolic activity

From ABC Color · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

Newswire From a news agency Context piece
  • A study in mice found that energy-intensive tissues adjust the number of macrophages they deploy to remove damaged mitochondria and other cellular waste.
  • Blocking macrophages from clearing the waste impaired the heart’s pumping ability, brown fat’s heat production and skeletal muscle strength.
  • Researchers found a similar link between mitochondrial activity and macrophage numbers in human muscle, suggesting the system could help preserve tissue function during aging.

The heart, skeletal muscles and brown fat maintain large cellular cleanup teams because their intense energy use produces substantial waste. Researchers found that these tissues adjust the number of macrophages, immune cells that remove debris, to match their metabolic workload.

The waste includes damaged mitochondria, the cell structures that act as energy plants by converting nutrients into usable energy. As mitochondria deteriorate, cells discard them. The more energy a tissue requires, the more damaged mitochondria accumulate, explained Andrés Hidalgo of Spain’s Carlos III National Cardiovascular Research Center, or CNIC.

The team tracked the fate of mitochondria in the heart muscle, skeletal muscle and brown fat of mice. The damaged organelles ended up inside macrophages. When researchers prevented the macrophages from removing the waste, the system stopped working properly: the heart pumped less effectively, brown fat produced less heat and skeletal muscle weakened.

Tissues need to stay clean to function at full capacity.

· Pura Muñoz-Cánoves, study author at Pompeu Fabra UniversityShe emphasized that removing cellular waste is necessary for the heart, muscles and brown fat to work effectively.

“Tissues need to stay clean to function at full capacity,” said Pura Muñoz-Cánoves of Spain’s Pompeu Fabra University, another study author. The researchers traced the start of the cleanup process to fibroblasts, structural cells whose numbers rose alongside mitochondrial activity. The fibroblasts then produced a signal that prompted macrophages to multiply, allowing tissues to size their cleanup teams according to the waste they generated.

An analysis of human muscle data showed that macrophage numbers also increased in parallel with mitochondrial activity, which the researchers used as an indicator of muscle activity. José Ángel Nicolás-Ávila of the University of California, San Francisco, said this balance “appears to be fundamental to our health.” The researchers also noted that tissue metabolism, waste accumulation and macrophage numbers change with age. They said the findings reveal signals linking these processes and could open the possibility of preserving tissue function during aging by acting on the system.

Appears to be fundamental to our health.

· José Ángel Nicolás-Ávila, researcher at the University of California, San FranciscoHe described the balance between tissue energy demands and macrophage numbers.
About this summary

Originally published by ABC Color in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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