Do cells behave less like a team over time?

Hi CarbonRobot,

Cells don't function like single celled organisms do. They function in teams, forming complex tissue, and we know that cells communicate with each other. Cells that don't are repaired, or marked for cell death.

Yeah, but doesn't their team work decrease with age? Clearly cells in general do everything less well with age, but does their intercellular communications get less good and the outcomes become less coordinated?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/

According to this article, there are 9 hallmark reasons for aging, and one of them is "altered intercellular communication", as stated:


As we age, the signaling environment of chemical messages across the whole body tends to become more inflammatory, inhibiting the immune system and potentially causing muscle wasting, bone loss and other harmful effects in a process known as inflammaging.

I highly recommend you read the section on "Altered Intercellular Communication" in the article link presented above; it discusses this idea of inflammaging a whole lot better.

Ok, so cellular communications are less good over time. But do those cells behave more for themselves and less for the organism, possibly because they are more communicationally isolated?

I assume there must be no choice? If a cell is getting fewer outside instructions it must act more for itself?

I'm not sure how would that be determined. It's a perfectly reasonable question to ask, whether or not cells become selfish with age, but I'm wondering how that could possibly be measured/quantified. The lack of signaling isn't due to "selfishness", but as a result of multiple factors that relate to aging (as mentioned in earlier posts). Cells don't have a mind of their own to suddenly quit the team when things become strenuous (or at least I'm not familiar with that notion). At the macro level, this has been written about and theorized by biologist, which was the entire premise behind the book The Selfish Gene (1976). The book claims that complex organisms have evolved as "survival machines" for the preservation of their genes. However, I'm not sure this relates to individual cells within the organism as well.