Soluble DLK1 secreted by telomere-shortening-induced senescent microglia impairs oligodendrocyte functions and alters neuronal activity

Bangyan Liu, Matthew Mahoney, Yilin Feng, Maria Telpoukhovskaia, Alice Maria Giani, Eileen Ruth Torres, Lihong Zhan, Pearly Ye, Jingjie Zhu, Nessa R Foxe, Daphne Zhu, Xinran Tong, Deepak Srivastava, Christine V. Theodoris, Shiaoching Gong, mingrui Zhao, Li Fan, Li Gan
2026 · doi:10.64898/2026.01.14.699608
preprint OA: closed CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0
📄 Open PDF Full text JSON View at publisher

Abstract

Summary Aging is the major risk factor for neurodegenerative disease, yet the mechanisms linking physiological aging to brain dysfunction remain unclear. Because telomere erosion is a hallmark of aging, we examined its impact on glial and neuronal physiology. Telomere shortened mice showed lipofuscinosis, hypomyelination, microglial atrophy, and cognitive deficits. Single nuclei RNA-seq revealed accelerated glial aging, elevated microglial senescence pathways, and impaired oligodendrocyte functions. Inducing senescence in human iPSC derived microglia with shortened telomeres identified soluble DLK1 as a novel senescence associated ligand. sDLK1 was increased in the cerebrospinal fluid of telomere shortened and naturally aged mice, and this increase was eliminated by microglial depletion. AAV delivery of sDLK1 in vivo caused hypomyelination and blocked oligodendrocyte lineage progression, demonstrating the detrimental nature of excessive sDLK1. In human iPSC systems, sDLK1 impaired oligodendrocyte maturation and altered calcium signaling in excitatory neurons. These findings identify microglial senescence as a core consequence of telomere shortening and reveal sDLK1 as a microglia-derived senescence ligand that drives oligodendrocyte and neuronal dysfunction in aging.
Full text 1,365 characters · extracted from oa-doi-fallback · click to expand
Summary Aging is the major risk factor for neurodegenerative disease, yet the mechanisms linking physiological aging to brain dysfunction remain unclear. Because telomere erosion is a hallmark of aging, we examined its impact on glial and neuronal physiology. Telomere shortened mice showed lipofuscinosis, hypomyelination, microglial atrophy, and cognitive deficits. Single nuclei RNA-seq revealed accelerated glial aging, elevated microglial senescence pathways, and impaired oligodendrocyte functions. Inducing senescence in human iPSC derived microglia with shortened telomeres identified soluble DLK1 as a novel senescence associated ligand. sDLK1 was increased in the cerebrospinal fluid of telomere shortened and naturally aged mice, and this increase was eliminated by microglial depletion. AAV delivery of sDLK1 in vivo caused hypomyelination and blocked oligodendrocyte lineage progression, demonstrating the detrimental nature of excessive sDLK1. In human iPSC systems, sDLK1 impaired oligodendrocyte maturation and altered calcium signaling in excitatory neurons. These findings identify microglial senescence as a core consequence of telomere shortening and reveal sDLK1 as a microglia-derived senescence ligand that drives oligodendrocyte and neuronal dysfunction in aging. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

⚙ Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-doi-fallback ⓘ

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Citation neighborhood (no data yet)

We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. This is a recent paper (2026) — citers typically take a year or two to land, and the OpenAlex reference graph may still be filling in.

References (80)

Source provenance

crossref
last seen: 2026-07-09T06:39:17.099264+00:00
europepmc
last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00
unpaywall
last seen: 2026-05-22T02:00:06.705733+00:00
License: CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0