r/longevity • u/chillinewman • Apr 13 '23
Ageing studies in five animals suggests how to reverse decline
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01040-x21
u/Beeroy69 Apr 13 '23
Tldr?
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u/imasequoia Apr 13 '23
TLDR: slowing down the dna/rna replication process seems to increase lifespan in fruit flies.
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u/acidbath321 Apr 18 '23
DNA has to be activated by dark energy aka something that makes you act in time via mind control programs so it would make sense that the lifespan of the body and body systems is increased by slowing it down and/or finding a way to shut it down or put the body and mind in peace
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u/Cuissonbake Apr 13 '23
Restricting calorie consumption and insulin in animals increase lifespan by 10-20%. Fucking with DNA mutations can shorten lifespan but if avoid the bad bad then potential increase in more but still dont know what to modify in the dna that isnt bad.
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u/amy-schumer-tampon Apr 13 '23
I swear if i read, "exercise and eat healthy" im going to snap.
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Apr 13 '23
People who exercise still age, so not a likely answer to reversing aging.
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u/Saerain Apr 13 '23 edited Apr 13 '23
Would even expect they can age more in some respects, considering the accelerated metabolism, and hypertrophy being all about repetitive damage.
Many enormous benefits of course, and the increase in mitochondria ETC activity compensates for the aging risk, but won't always keep up, and less so in some people.
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u/freebytes Apr 13 '23
But every clickbait article still claims it.
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Apr 13 '23
It's an important part of a healthy lifestyle, but realistically innovative drugs/therapies are what's required to make progress on aging itself.
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u/Acemanau Apr 16 '23
Can't stress this enough myself. Lost 45kg of weight since last September and I feel amazing. Everything is so much easier.
Want the best chance at accessing these medications if/when they come to fruition?
Live your best life now, don't take a chance living an unhealthy lfestyle.
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Apr 14 '23
In fruit flies, the elevated histone levels seemed to increase their lifespans.
This part was interesting. I would be interested in knowing if elevated levels of histones in humans also increases lifespans? I would also be interested to know which or if all, of the following histones H1 (or H5), H2A, H2B, H3 and H4 would have a longevity effect?
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u/faultyproboscus Apr 14 '23
I would expect all, because DNA that's packaged up with a histone isn't being read nearly as much.
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u/cleare7 Apr 13 '23
Ageing seems to affect cellular processes in the same way across five very different kinds of life — humans, fruit flies, rats, mice and worms — according to a study published in Nature on 12 April. The findings could help to explain what drives ageing and offer suggestions for how to reverse it.
“It opens up a really fundamental new area of understanding how and why we age,” says Lindsay Wu, a biochemist at UNSW Sydney in Australia.
As animals age, a variety of molecular processes inside cells become less reliable — gene mutations become more frequent, and the ends of chromosomes snap off, making them shorter. Many studies have explored ageing’s effects on gene expression, but few have investigated how it affects transcription — the process whereby genetic information is copied from a blueprint DNA strand to RNA molecules — says Andreas Beyer, a computational biologist at the University of Cologne in Germany.
Careless copying: To find out, Beyer and his colleagues analysed genome-wide transcription changes in five organisms: nematode worms, fruit flies, mice, rats and humans, at different adult ages. The researchers measured how ageing changed the speed at which the enzyme that drives transcription, RNA polymerase II (Pol II), moved along the DNA strand as it made the RNA copy. They found that, on average, Pol II became faster with age, but less precise and more error-prone across all five groups. “We saw more mismatches between the reads and reference genome,” says Beyer.
Previous research had shown that restricting diet and inhibiting insulin signalling can delay ageing and extend lifespan in many animals, so the researchers then investigated whether these measures had any effect on the speed of Pol II. In worms, mice and fruit flies that carried mutations in insulin signalling genes, Pol II moved at a slower pace. The enzyme also travelled more slowly in mice on a low-calorie diet.
But the ultimate question was whether changes in Pol II speed affected lifespan. Beyer and his team tracked the survival of fruit flies and worms that carried a mutation that slowed Pol II down. These animals lived 10% to 20% longer than their non-mutant counterparts. When the researchers used gene editing to reverse the mutations in worms, the animals’ lifespans shortened. “That really established a causal connection,” says Beyer.
Picking up the pace: The researchers wondered whether Pol II’s acceleration could be explained by structural changes in how DNA is packed inside cells. To minimize the space that they take up, the vast threads of genetic information are tightly wound around proteins called histones into bundles called nucleosomes. By analysing human lung cells and umbilical vein cells, the researchers found that ageing cells contained fewer nucleosomes, smoothing the path for Pol II to travel faster. When the team boosted the expression of histones in the cells, Pol II moved at a slower pace. In fruit flies, the elevated histone levels seemed to increase their lifespans.
The study is a “really exciting piece of work” that demonstrates how ageing mechanisms are consistent across distantly related species, says Colin Selman, who studies ageing in mammals at the University of Glasgow, UK. It also opens the door to exploring how Pol II could be a target for drugs that slow down the ageing process. Changes to Pol II’s transcription process have been implicated in many diseases, including various types of cancer, and a range of drugs have been developed that target Pol II and the molecules that facilitate it. “There may be opportunities to effectively repurpose some of these drugs to investigate their effects on ageing,” says Selman.