Though Ponce de León never found the “Fountain of Youth“, Cambridge scientists might have found a way to extend life… at least in killifish.
The African Turquoise Killifish lives for only 3-12 months, one of the shortest lives of all vertebrates (animals with a backbone) on earth, but their variety of lifespans make them a very attractive model to study aging. A team of scientists from the University of Cambridge compared the genome of the short-lived vs. long-lived killifish and found that genes encoding for energy production are most likely to explain the difference in age of death.
The scientists flew down to Mozambique where killifish reside in small tidal pools and took cell samples of 152 young killifish when they were about 10-20 weeks old and then watched the fish grow up to determine if they were short lived or long living fish. Once the fish died, they looked at the “expression” of their genome.
The overall experiment, from their killifish sequencing to their drug success-Courtesy of Research Article
Expression is the term used to describe when DNA gets translated into RNA before becoming a functioning protein. To determine expression they used a computer program called RNA-Seq (only takes about 4 days!) that sequences the RNA strand.
The biggest difference between the short-lived and long-lived killifish DNA expression was for a “mitochondrial chain complex” that aids in the respiration of mitochondria, an organelle that is the “powerhouse” since it converts oxygen and sugar into energy. What they found was that there was more DNA expression for this complex in shorter-lived fish, showing that high respiration rates could influence and negatively impact life expectancy. Maybe mitochondria acts as a battery for our lives as well.
To further test their findings, the team gave the killifish a drug that attaches to the complex and slows down the respiration rate for mitochondria. When the fish took this drug, it increased their life expectancy by 15%.
So no, we will not have this “Fountain of Youth” pill commercially available any time soon, but this research provides a very interesting spin on a common question scientists ask: How much do our genes dictate our lives?
Read the original article here:
Baumgart, Mario et al. (2016) Longitudinal RNA-Seq Analysis of Vertebrate Aging Identifies Mitochondrial Complex I as a Small-Molecule-Sensitive Modifier of Lifespan. Cell System, Volume 2 , Issue 2 , 122 – 132
