Our bodies possess a remarkable ability for extensive and sustained tissue renewal throughout a lifetime. This continuous self-renewal capacity is maintained by reservoirs of somatic tissue stem cells8,9. These tissue stem cells have garnered increasing attention in ageing and regenerative research given accumulating evidence that age-associated physiological decline, particularly in highly proliferative organs, parallels blunted proliferative responses and misdirected differentiation of resident tissue stem cells (Fig. 1). At the same time, these long-lived renewable reservoirs may also negatively affect the health of aged individuals by providing a preferred cellular compartment for malignancy 9.
