Proliferative senescence of embryo fibroblasts of Japanese senescence accelerated mice is accompanied by parallel decreasing of the response to various growth factors

The Japanese senescence accelerated mice (SAM) are a group of the low-longevity mouse lines and represent a new convenient model for studying the senescence process. We studied the proliferation of embryo fibroblasts of SAMP1 and SAMR1 mouse lines. It was shown that fibroblasts of the shortest longevity line SAMP1 have a markedly decreased proliferative potential of the mean 8.7 population doublings, whereas fibroblasts of a relatively high-longevity line SAMR1 have an average proliferative potential of 12.3 doublings. The fibroblast senescence in both lines is accompanied by simultaneous lowering of the cell proliferative response to the blood serum, epidermal, fibroblast, and platelet-derived growth factors. At initial stages of the cell culture growth, lines SAMP1 and SAMR1 exhibit the same reactions to growth factors, but already beginning from the fifth doubling, the SAMP1 cell response is sharply decreased as compared with SAMR1. Lowering of the proliferative reaction is accompanied by decreased phosphorylation of tyrosine in the cell proteins responsible for the mitogenic reaction. Thus, the parallel decrease in the proliferative response to different growth factors during fibroblast senescence is most likely due to the emergence of a regulatory block at common stages of the mitogenic signal transduction.