Gut bacterial metabolite promotes neural cell death leading to cognitive decline

electrophoresis that allowed for the tracking of DNA mobility shifts—which they called single-strand gel shift. They next incubated the gene responsible for sensing and responding to aging in mice (S100A8) with IAA. They found the metabolite binds to a promoter region of S100A8, which allowed for expression of the gene, resulting in production of apoptotic bodies, which lead to cell death.

To learn more about what happens when such bindings occur, the researchers fed IAA to young healthy mice and determined that this resulted in a loss of cognitive function. They next blocked production of the metabolite in the guts of older mice and found that it led to improvements in cognitive performance.

They state more research needs to be done to find out if the production of IAA in the human gut biome also results in cognitive decline, and if so, whether blocking its production would prevent cognitive decline as people age.

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