Your morning coffee may be doing more than helping you wake up. Research from Queen Mary University of London suggests that caffeine can activate an ancient cellular energy system involved in growth, stress resistance, and DNA repair. Those processes are closely tied to aging, which could help explain why caffeine has been linked to potential health benefits in earlier studies.
The findings come from the Cellular Ageing and Senescence laboratory at Queen Mary University of London's Centre for Molecular Cell Biology and were published in Microbial Cell. Caffeine is the world's most widely used neuroactive compound, meaning it affects the nervous system and brain activity. Most people know it for boosting alertness, but scientists have also been interested in its possible connection to a lower risk of some age-related diseases.
What has been less clear is how caffeine might produce those effects inside cells. To investigate, the researchers turned to fission yeast, a single-celled organism that shares many important biological features with human cells. Because of those similarities, fission yeast is sometimes called a "mini-human" and is widely used to study basic cellular processes.
The team found that caffeine appears to affect aging by tapping into a deeply conserved energy sensing system. In biology, conserved pathways are mechanisms that have remained similar through evolution because they perform essential jobs. A few years ago, the same research group showed that caffeine could help cells live longer by influencing a growth regulator called TOR (Target of Rapamycin).
TOR acts like a cellular growth switch. It helps cells decide when to grow based on the amount of food and energy available. That system is remarkably ancient.
Versions of it have been regulating growth, energy use, and stress responses in living organisms for more than 500 million years. Caffeine Does Not Act Where Scientists Expected The latest study revealed a surprising twist. Instead of acting directly on TOR, caffeine appears to work through another major cellular system called AMPK.
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