For human health, prematurely aging cells are a big problem. When a cell ages and stops growing, its function changes, which can cause or worsen cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease and other chronic diseases. But these cells are also like needles in a haystack, difficult to identify by traditional scientific measures.
To find these problematic cells, a University of Illinois Chicago doctoral student has developed a powerful new software platform called SenePy. In a paper for Nature Communications, Mark Sanborn and co-authors from the College of Medicine announced the open-source tool to find aging – or senescent – cells in organs and tissues.
The tool will give researchers a boost for studying these biologically important cells to better understand and treat several diseases, according…