Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 7|pp 6030—6036

Elevated p38MAPK activity promotes neural stem cell aging

Leire Moreno-Cugnon¹, Olatz Arrizabalaga¹, Irantzu Llarena², Ander Matheu^1,^3,⁴

¹Biodonostia Health Research Institute, Group of Cellular Oncology, San Sebastian, Spain
²Optical Spectroscopy Platform, CIC biomaGUNE, Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA), San Sebastian, Spain
³CIBERfes, Madrid, Spain
⁴IKERBASQUE Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain

Received: December 17, 2019Accepted: February 20, 2020Published: April 3, 2020

Copyright © 2020 Moreno-Cugnon et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Age-progressive neural stem cell (NSC) dysfunction leads to impaired neurogenesis, cognitive decline and the onset of age-related neurodegenerative pathologies. p38MAPK signalling pathway limits stem cell activity during aging in several tissues. Its role in NSCs remains controversial. In this work, we show that p38MAPK activity increases in NSCs with age in the subventricular zone (SVZ) and its pharmacological inhibition is sufficient to rejuvenate their activity in vitro. These data reveal a cell-autonomous role for p38MAPK increase in decreasing NSC homeostasis with age. This information shed light in the role of p38MAPK in NSC aging.