Female Brains Have More “Old” Cells, Alzheimer’s Study Finds

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have found that certain brain cells age faster than others and are more common in people with Alzheimer’s disease. They also noted differences in the aging of specific brain cells between sexes, with the female cortex showing a greater proportion of “old” oligodendrocytes relative to “old” neurons compared to the male cortex.

The discoveries were made possible by a new technique called MUSIC (multinucleic acid interaction mapping in single cells), which allows researchers to peek inside individual brain cells and map out interactions between chromatin—which is the tightly coiled form of DNA—and RNA. This technique enables researchers to visualize these interactions at single-cell resolution, as well as study how they influence gene expression.