Aging Reveals a Brain Protein Switch—and Diet May Reset It

Aging destabilizes the brain’s protein ubiquitylation system, with reduced proteasome activity causing damaged proteins to accumulate and shift in activity, potentially driving cognitive decline and vulnerability to neurodegenerative disease. Notably, a short calorie-restriction diet in old mice significantly altered ubiquitylation patterns, in some cases reversing them toward a youthful state, suggesting diet can influence brain aging and that ubiquitylation could serve as a biomarker for age-related neural decline.