{"doi":"10.1242/dev.204970","title":"Non-autonomy of age-related morphological changes in the <i>C. elegans</i> germline stem cell niche","abstract":"Declines in tissue renewal and repair due to alterations in tissue stem cells is a hallmark of aging. Many stem cell pools are maintained morphologically complex niches. Using the C. elegans hermaphrodite germline stem cell system, we analyzed age-related changes in the morphology of the niche, the distal tip cell (DTC), and identified a molecular mechanism that promotes a subset of these changes. We found decreases in the number and length of long DTC processes with age. We also found that a long-lived daf-2 mutant exhibits a daf-16-dependent maintenance of long DTC processes. Surprisingly, the tissue requirement for daf-16(+) is non-autonomous, and daf-16(+) in body wall muscle is both necessary and sufficient. In addition, after a delay, pre-formed DTC processes deteriorate upon premature germline differentiation, but not upon cell cycle inhibition. We propose a reciprocal DTC-germline interaction model and speculate how reduced daf-2 activity both delays stem cell exhaustion and maintains DTC processes. These studies establish the C. elegans DTC as a powerful in vivo model for understanding age-related changes in cellular morphology and their consequences in stem cell systems.","journal":"Development","year":2025,"id":550964,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":2,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9546,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1446829,"name":"Mia Sinks","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":530547,"name":"E. Jane Albert Hubbard","orcid":"0000-0001-5893-7232","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1446486,"name":"N. Gupta","orcid":"0009-0009-1865-1569","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":52,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:54:20.915388Z","pmid":"41123253","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}