Tag: dna

Mammoth deextinction

by inserting this modified DNA into an elephant’s egg cell, and implanting it in an elephant’s womb, you could create a modified elephant that’s nearly identical to the original mammoth

The far north could probably handle the mammoth deextinction.

2021-09-29: Colossal

The company, named Colossal, aims to place 1000s of these magnificent beasts back on the Siberian tundra, 1000s of years after they went extinct. “This is a major milestone for us,” said George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, who for 8 years has been leading a small team of moonlighting researchers developing the tools for reviving mammoths. “It’s going to make all the difference in the world.” Today the tundra is dominated by moss. But when woolly mammoths were around, it was largely grassland. Some researchers have argued that woolly mammoths were ecosystem engineers, maintaining the grasslands by breaking up moss, knocking down trees and providing fertilizer with their droppings. Russian ecologists have imported bison and other living species to a preserve in Siberia they’ve dubbed Pleistocene Park, in the hopes of turning the tundra back to grassland. Dr. Church argued that resurrected woolly mammoths would be able to do this more efficiently. The restored grassland would keep the soil from melting and eroding, he argued, and might even lock away heat-trapping CO2. Initially, Dr. Church envisioned implanting embryos into surrogate female elephants. But he eventually soured on the idea. Even if he could figure out in vitro fertilization for elephants — which no one has done before — building a herd would be impractical, since he would need so many surrogates. Instead, Dr. Church decided to make an artificial mammoth uterus lined with uterine tissue grown from stem cells. “I’m not making a bold prediction this is going to be easy, but everything up to this point has been relatively easy. Every tissue we’ve gone after, we’ve been able to get a recipe for.”

DNA Heritage

I submitted my DNA anonymously to IBM for a research project, and from the mutations in my Y-chromosome alone, they identified me as haplotype N LLY22G, which pegs the Uralic language of my family and the locale of northern Scandinavia / Eastern Europe. With only my DNA, they identified my family origin on the map above to within a few km, and traced it back to the veritable “Adam” in Africa, from whom we are all descendants.

I wonder how granular these will get eventually. The beginning of the tree is well-known and comparatively easy. Still, welcome to total history beta 1.
2022-03-04:

8 ka BP, 17 women reproduced for every 1 man. An analysis of modern DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture. A member of the research team hypothesizes that only a few men accumulated lots of wealth and power, leaving nothing for others. These men could then pass their wealth on to their sons, perpetuating this pattern of elitist reproductive success. Then the numbers of men reproducing, compared to women, rose again. “Maybe more and more people started being successful.”. In more recent history, as a global average, 5 women reproduced for every 1 man.

Antibiotics

For all you antibacterial soap-using dummies.

Unlike (soap and other) traditional cleaners, antibacterial products leave surface residues, creating conditions that may foster the development of resistant bacteria. Alcohol-based hand sanitizers are just about as effective against germs as soap and water. They’re also easier on your skin than hand-washing, and unlike antibacterial soaps, they don’t breed antibiotic-resistant superbacteria.

The bottom line is that you shouldn’t live in fear of high-traffic surfaces. This type of contact simply isn’t the way people get sick.

2010-11-08: We are essentially back to an era with no antibiotics

This new resistance pattern has been reported in many different types of bacteria compared to previously and 10% of these NDM1-containing strains appears to be pan-resistant, which means that there is no known antibiotic that can treat it. A second concern is that there is no significant new drug development for antimicrobials.

2015-01-08: New Antibiotics Platform?

A lot of people have had similar ideas to this one, based on the fact that the overwhelming majority of bacteria in any given environmental sample can’t be readily cultured. These organisms may well be able to produce useful antibiotics and other natural products, but how will you ever be able to tell if you can’t fish any of them out? Using this on a soil sample from Maine and leaving the chip in situ for a month, a number of colonies formed. These were tested for their ability to grow outside the device in fermentation broth, and extracts of these were tested against pre-grown lawns of an S. aureus strain to look for useful antibiotic activity. Lo and behold, one extract cleared out a large spot – it turned out to come from a newly described bacterium (Eleftheria terrae, provisionally). The compound present has been named teixobactin, and here it is. So how useful is the compound? It’s active only against gram-positive organisms, which is too bad, because we could really use some new gram-negative killers (their cell membranes make them a tougher breed). But the mechanism of action turns out to be interesting: studies of S. aureus with labeled precursors showed that teixobactin is a peptidoglycan synthesis inhibitor, but extended exposure and passaging did not yield any resistant strains. That’s close to impossible if an antibiotic is binding a particular protein target – stepping on the selection pressure will usually turn up something that evades the drug. When you don’t see that, it’s often because there’s some nonspecific non-protein-targeted mechanism, which can be problematic, but teixobactin isn’t toxic to eukaryotic cells in culture (and has a favorable tox profile in mice as well). It turns out that it binds to some of the peptidoglycan precursors, lipid II and lipid III. Vancomycin has a similar mechanism (binding to lipid II), but teixobactin has a wider spectrum of activity against lipid II variants (and lipid III as well). This mechanism makes developing resistance not so straightforward – the selection pressure is more of a bounce shot than a direct hit.

2015-02-24: Antibiotics market failure

we seem willing to pay $100K or more for cancer drugs that cure no one and at best add weeks or a few months to life. We are willing to pay 1$0Ks for knee surgery that, at best, improves function but is not lifesaving. So why won’t we pay $10K for a lifesaving antibiotic?

2015-03-31: Medieval salve kills MRSA. Impressive! Not all ancient medical knowledge is homeopathic nonsense.

Take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together… take wine and bullocks gall, mix with the leek… let it stand 9 days in the brass vessel

So goes a 1000-year-old Anglo Saxon recipe to vanquish a stye, an infected eyelash follicle. If the 9th Century recipe does lead to new drugs, they might be useful against MRSA skin infections such as those that cause foot ulcers in people with diabetes. These are usually antibiotic-resistant

2016-01-23: Antibiotics synthesis

Antibiotics are generally synthesized in nature by bacteria (or other microbes) as defenses against each other. We have identified antibiotics in the lab, and thus necessarily only those made by bacterial species that we can grow in the lab. Almost all bacterial species cannot be grown in the lab using practical methods. That hasn’t changed for decades. But those bacteria grow fine in the environment, typically the soil. So… can we isolate antibiotics from the soil?

2018-05-21: Phage Therapy

3 months earlier, Patterson had suddenly fallen ill, so severely that he had to be medevaced to Germany and then to UCSD. There were several things wrong—a gallstone, an abscess in his pancreas—but the core of the problem was an infection with a superbug, a bacterium named Acinetobacter baumannii that was resistant to every antibiotic his medical team tried to treat it with. Patterson was wasted, his cheekbones jutting through his skin. Intravenous lines snaked into his arms and neck, and tubes to carry away seepage pierced his abdomen. He was delirious and his blood pressure was falling, and the medical staff had sedated him and intubated him to make sure he got the oxygen he needed. He was dying. … “We are running out of options to save Tom. What do you think about phage therapy?”

2019-11-04: CRISPR Antibiotics

An alarming number of bacteria are now resistant to one or more antibiotics, so this new line of inquiry would certainly be welcomed if it proves effective.

In their recent study, Dr. Edgell and his colleagues successfully used a Crispr-associated enzyme called Cas9 to eliminate a species of Salmonella. By programming the Cas9 to view the bacterium itself as the enemy, Dr. Edgell and his colleagues were able to force Salmonella to make lethal cuts to its own genome.

As we discover more of the benefits of our microbiota, it would also be interesting to have a solution to bacterial infections which doesn’t create problems for our “good bacteria.

2020-02-22: Antibiotics ML

So overall, this is an impressive paper. The combination of what appears to be pretty rigorous ML work with actual assay data generated just for this project seems to have worked out well, and represents, I would say, the current state of the art. It is not the “Here’s your drug!” virtual screening of fond hopes and press releases, but it’s a real improvement on what’s come before and seems to have generated things that are well worth following up on. I would be very interested indeed in seeing such technology applied to other drug targets and other data sets – but then, that’s what people all around academia and industry are trying to do right now. Let’s hope that they’re doing it with the scope and the attention to detail presented in this work.

2020-07-24: SCH-79797

Researchers have found a compound, SCH-79797, that can simultaneously puncture bacterial walls and destroy folate within their cells — while being immune to antibiotic resistance. This is the first antibiotic that can target Gram-positives and Gram-negatives without resistance

2020-08-07: Maybe the non-profit route will work

If something isn’t done now, antibiotic-resistant bacteria could kill as many as 10M people a year by 2050. A little-known Boston nonprofit could be our best hope.

2021-07-28: Biofilms are nasty

This discovery underscores how important it is to include biofilms in any studies of antibacterial compounds because being able to kill planktonic cultures bears no relation to being able to break down biofilm.

2021-10-14: Another approach is to modify bacteria to destroy the MSRA biofilms

Bacteria present a promising delivery system for treating human diseases. Here, we engineered the genome-reduced human lung pathogen Mycoplasma pneumoniae as a live biotherapeutic to treat biofilm-associated bacterial infections. This strain has a unique genetic code, which hinders gene transfer to most other bacterial genera, and it lacks a cell wall, which allows it to express proteins that target peptidoglycans of pathogenic bacteria. We first determined that removal of the pathogenic factors fully attenuated the chassis strain in vivo. We then designed synthetic promoters and identified an endogenous peptide signal sequence that, when fused to heterologous proteins, promotes efficient secretion. Based on this, we equipped the chassis strain with a genetic platform designed to secrete antibiofilm and bactericidal enzymes, resulting in a strain capable of dissolving Staphylococcus aureus biofilms preformed on catheters in vitro, ex vivo, and in vivo. To our knowledge, this is the first engineered genome-reduced bacterium that can fight against clinically relevant biofilm-associated bacterial infections.

2023-05-23: Odd that phage therapy only made progress in former soviet republics

“Phages” are little known outside the former countries of the Soviet Union, which did the most to develop the idea. In Georgia they have been part of the local pharmacopoeia for decades. (Indeed, 2023 marks the Eliava’s centenary.) Little vials containing stale-tasting liquid full of anti-bacterial viruses can be bought at pharmacies across Tbilisi. Now, as worries about antibiotic resistance build, Western firms are taking a second look.

Microbiome

Human microbiome program?

Because of the importance of beneficial / commensal microbes in human biology, there have been growing efforts to characterize the microbes in various body locations – gut, mouth, lungs, skin, etc. But the efforts so far have simply given a tantalizing taste of how interesting and important these microbes are. So here comes this meeting. Organized by NIH (specifically, Francis Collins at NHGRI), this workshop is geared to discuss the possibility that studies of the human microbiome will be included in the next list of “NIH Roadmap” programs. More on the NIH Roadmap some other time.

Basically, the general idea is – do we need an big scale, organized program to tackle the human microbiome.? To get us in the mood, we had talks by many of the pioneers/leaders in the field (e.g., David Relman, Jeff Gordon, Jim Tiedje) as well as discussion of the NIH Roadmap program. I personally did not need any convincing but it was good to hear some of the ideas presented. In the end, I think there is no doubt that a large scale Human Microbiome Program is needed and would be very beneficial.

In addition to the 10 trillion human cells, there are 100 trillion bacterial cells in a body. Our metagenome may be 100x the human genome.
2010-10-30: Space Standard Microbiome. Venter suggests NASA should replace the microbiome (bacteria species) of astronauts with a standardized, synthetic one to improve survivability of space flight.
2012-06-15: 0.3% Human

Where the human genome carries some 22K protein-coding genes, the human microbiome contributes some 8M protein-coding genes responsible for human survival: 360x more.

The microbiome is one of the most fascinating areas in biology:

in many mammals a microbial community ferments various sweats, oozes and excretions into distinctive scents that reveal age, health and much more to knowing noses in a select social circle.

That’s right, microbes are posting status updates to each other through smells, sharing with other microbes what they’ve learned about host animals.
2012-12-08: American Gut looks amazing. I will of course participate. Since you are only 10% human (the rest is bacteria), even if you do 23andme you don’t really know yourself at all. $99 for 1 bacterial DNA kit, $180 for 2. There are also higher levels, up to the $25k ultra-deep sequencing of your microbiome sample aimed at generating as many individual bacterial genomes as possible.
2015-03-03: a nice summary of The American Gut project

2016-10-01: Poop Bot. As usual, onion’s satire is leading the way:

you can tell the most about someone by sampling their microbiome, and “the sewage system is the great aggregator.” Gross, sure, but Ratti is studying waste to understand everything from heroin use to antibiotic-resistant bacteria—and all with the help of a sewer-slurping robot named Luigi.

2017-09-05: Microbiome 99% unknown

A survey of DNA fragments circulating in the blood suggests the microbes living within us are vastly more diverse than previously known. In fact, 99% of that DNA has never been seen before. The “vast majority” of it belonged to a phylum called proteobacteria, which includes, among many other species, pathogens such as E. coli and Salmonella. Previously unidentified viruses in the torque teno family, generally not associated with disease but often found in immunocompromised patients, made up the largest group of viruses.

2018-10-03: SynBioBeta 2018

In 15 years, brain interfaces will be as common as the cell phone. The radical experiment that has been run over the past 100 years shifting the microbiome of infants and provoking a wide array of immune disorders (allergies, asthma, diabetes)

2019-08-07: Microbiome Friendships?

Now that it is clear that social behavior plays a role in shaping the gut microbiome, the next question is whether microbiomes have had a meaningful impact on our social worlds. Scientists still do not have an answer, but they are tantalized by the possibilities, which could have implications for understanding the evolution of sociality.

2019-12-04: Microbiomes Affect Fear

microbiomes can influence the fear responses of their hosts, possibly by releasing compounds that affect the brain’s neuroanatomy and function.

2022-02-22: Space microbiome

Humans aren’t the only organisms that we have to consider when evaluating the impacts of space travel. While we are traveling on spaceships, microbes are traveling on us. Microgravity has been shown to alter bacterial growth patterns and kinetics, and radiation increases the frequency of mutations—in both cases creating opportunities for increased antimicrobial resistance—all in an environment where astronauts immune systems are compromised. The ISS has a complex microbiome that we fundamentally alter, and that in turn alters us. It’s important to be able to understand the genetic basis of antimicrobial resistance in space. A team of researchers carried out a study with the goal of addressing this question. A considerable number of AMR genes were found in several different locations for Kalamiella piersonii—a microbe potentially involved in causing urinary tract infections. Worryingly, “the potentially very pathogenic microbe E. bugandensis was found in location 2 (forward side panel wall of the Waste and Hygiene Compartment) in flight 1, presenting more than 40 ARGs.” They were also able to detect specific types of potential drug resistance for several microbes within the Pantoea species—which provided a higher level of resolution into observations made in their past analysis.

2023-01-19: person-to-person transmission

Mother-to-infant gut microbiome transmission was considerable and stable during infancy (around 50% of the same strains among shared species (strain-sharing rate)) and remained detectable at older ages. By contrast, the transmission of the oral microbiome occurred largely horizontally and was enhanced by the duration of cohabitation. There was substantial strain sharing among cohabiting individuals, with 12% and 32% median strain-sharing rates for the gut and oral microbiomes, and time since cohabitation affected strain sharing more than age or genetics did.

2023-05-04: Using dental plaque to reconstruct the oral microbiome

Reconstructing an oral microbiome—a soup of 100s of different bacterial species, and millions of individual bacteria—from degraded ancient DNA is “like throwing together pieces of many puzzles and trying to solve them with the pieces mixed up and some pieces missing entirely”.

It took 3 years to adapt DNA sequencing tools and computer programs to work with the much shorter fragments of DNA found in ancient samples. Drawing on dental calculus from 46 ancient skeletons—including a dozen Neanderthals and modern humans who died between 30k and 150 years ago, Warinner identified DNA from 10s of extinct or previously unknown oral bacteria.
Identified as a type of bacterium called a chlorobium, its modern relatives use photosynthesis to survive on small amounts of light and live in anaerobic conditions, such as stagnant water. They aren’t found in modern mouths and appear to have vanished from ancient humans 10 ka BP. This chlorobium might have entered the mouths of ancient people because they drank water in or near caves. Or it might once have been a normal part of some people’s ancient oral microbiome, surviving on faint light penetrating the cheek.

2023-06-08: Sample handling ruins many studies

The authors have tried all sorts of sample-handling variations, and it looks like they have had trouble finding any that don’t change the composition of the microbial samples themselves. Both papers investigated the 2 commercially available stool sample kits (OMNIgene and Zymo), and found that the latter was much more sensitive to temperature variations on storage. And both kits changed the absolute levels of various bacteria types: the OMNIgene-preserved samples had significantly higher amounts of Bacteroidetes species as compared to preservative-free controls, while the Zymo-preserved ones had significantly lower amounts. The second paper also finds that the method used for cell disruption can significantly affect the ribosomal RNA reads used to characterize the bacterial species as well.

Researchers in the field should also be measuring total bacterial load in their samples and monitoring that for signs of variability in their sample handling and people should standardize on 25 PCR cycles, because that can also change things. These effects can help explain the widely varying literature results in human microbiome studies.

Life Extension

In a series of experiments on earthworms, scientists have identified PHA-4, which plays a critical role in prolonging life without tapping into insulin-regulating neural pathways that also control the aging process.

I bet they are partying over at SENS.
2007-08-13: The baby boomers don’t want to die, like all prior generations. but unlike them, they have the financial means to massively fund anti-aging research like SENS. This is only the very beginning.
2008-01-09: I wonder whether CR is compatible with evolutionary fitness.
2008-05-26: Intrinsic Pluripotency

We show that extrinsic stimuli are dispensable for the derivation, propagation and pluripotency of ES cells. The discovery has major implications for large scale production of specialized cells, such as brain, heart muscle and insulin producing cells, for future therapeutic use.

2011-03-08: Telomere shortening

Prematurely aged (shortened) telomeres appears to be a common feature of iPS cells created by current pluripotency protocols. However, the spontaneous appearance of lines that express sufficient telomerase activity to extend telomere length may allow the reversal of developmental aging in human cells for use in regenerative medicine.

Injecting pluripotent cells into your blood stream can reverse aging effects.
2013-09-18: Google used to say, cheekily, that making search faster times billions of users saves lives, so doing anti aging seems like the logical next step. I also like this because it couldn’t be further from all the web 2.0 incrementalist nonsense most startups limit themselves to.
2014-06-13: Stem cell pills

I started taking Stem Cell 100 back in 2011. It is $60 for a 1 month supply. There is now Stem Cell 100+ [$75 for a 1 month supply]. They added more ingredients and the testimonials are that it acts faster and is more powerful and more people have noticeable positive changes.

2015-06-18: Aging as a disease

Let’s face it – any other syndrome that caused the sorts of effects that age does on our bodies would be considered a plague. But we’re used to it, and it happens to everyone, and it happens slowly. Does it have to be that way? The history of medicine is a refusal to play the cards that we’ve been dealt, and there’s no reason to stop now.

2015-08-04: Young blood

the age of an organism, or an organ like the brain, is not written in stone. It is malleable. You can move it in 1 direction or the other. It’s almost mythological that something in young organisms can maintain youthfulness, and it’s probably true.

2015-08-09: Youthful telomeres

children of centenarians, who have a good chance of becoming centenarians themselves, maintained their telomeres at a “youthful” level corresponding to 60 years of age — even when they became 80 or older. Centenarian offspring also maintained lower levels of markers for chronic inflammation.

2015-12-28: Aging and excercise

Almost any amount and type of physical activity may slow aging deep within our cells. And middle age may be a critical time to get the process rolling, at least by one common measure of cell aging.

2016-10-07: Rapamycin

Nearly 10 years of research showing that Rapamycin makes mice live up to 60% longer, scientists are trying it out as an anti-aging drug in dogs and humans. Researchers gave rapamycin to 16 dogs and imaged their hearts. “It started to function better. It started to look like a more youthful heart”. Those dogs took rapamycin for only 10 weeks.

2017-03-27: NMN

The scientists identified that the metabolite NAD+, which is naturally present in every cell of our body, has a key role as a regulator in protein-to-protein interactions that control DNA repair. Treating mice with a NAD+ precursor, or “booster,” called NMN improved their cells’ ability to repair DNA damage caused by radiation exposure or old age. “The cells of the old mice were indistinguishable from the young mice, after just 1 week of treatment”. Human trials of NMN therapy will begin within 6 months. “This is the closest we are to a safe and effective anti-aging drug that’s perhaps only 3 to 5 years away from being on the market if the trials go well”

2017-06-07: SENS progress

There is much to be optimistic about and the ideas proposed by SENS over 10 years ago and widely criticized are now being eagerly explored by researchers as it becomes ever more apparent that the aging processes are amenable to intervention. What was mocked just over 10 years ago is now becoming an accepted approach to treating age-related diseases as the result continue to mount up in support of a repair based approach to aging. However we still lack complete knowledge on several age-related damages to progress to clinical trials in humans.

2017-11-03: Dietary supplements

Targeting multiple aging pathways has the potential to significantly reduce blood pressure and stress, while significantly increasing HDL Cholesterol levels and lung capacity. Targeting multiple critical aging pathways with a single dietary supplement is a novel alternative strategy to promote overall health.

2018-05-10: Pets as platforms

“We have already done a bunch of trials in mice and we are doing some in dogs, and then we’ll move on to humans”. The US pet industry is a $72B-a-year market.

The prolongation of human lifespan is “the biggest thing that is going to happen in the 21st century. It’s going to make what Elon Musk is doing look fairly pedestrian.”

Rejuvenate Bio has met with investors and won a grant from the US Special Operations Command to look into “enhancement” of military dogs while Harvard is seeking a broad patent on genetic means of aging control in species including the “cow, pig, horse, cat, dog, rat, etc.”

The team hit on the idea of treating pets because proving that it’s possible to increase longevity in humans would take too long. “You don’t want to go to the FDA and say we extend life by 20 years. They’d say, ‘Great, come back in 20 years with the data’”.

2018-08-14: investable SENS

Aubrey De Grey discusses how all of the aspects of fighting the damage of aging have reached an investable stage. 10 years ago only stem cells were investable. Now companies have been formed to attempt to counter all of the types of aging damage.

2018-09-12: Rejuvenate Bio

George Church talks about reversing human aging and claims they made mice live 2x as long. Organ longevity has also been done successfully with entire mice. If the body still did not get rid of the substandard cells then work at Oisin Biotechnology and others would enable bad cells to be cleared. Oisin is extending the life of mice and has proven safety and improvement in monkeys. They will start human clinical trials in 2019. Rejuvenate Bio has 60 aging reversal gene therapies. They have mentioned but not yet published eye popping results in mice. They are testing aging reversal in dogs in 2018-2019. Human treatments could be available on a general basis by 2025.

2018-10-31: Antiaging funding levels

There is increasing of pharmaceutical company engagement via disease-focused proof of concept trials. Curing all cancers would add 3.5 years to average human lifespan. If anti-aging could delay the start of aging disease from 50 or 60 by 20 or 30 years then this could be 10x better than curing cancer. $50b per year is spent on curing cancer. If medical research was allocated based upon potential impact then anti-aging should be at a funding level of $500 billion per year.

2019-01-31: NMN

His anti aging regimen is to activate pathways to improve the body’s defenses against aging. He is testing NMN on human subjects. He describes NMN is fuel for sirtuins. NMN is related to NR. NR increases the levels of NAD. Sirtuins need NAD to work. We lose NAD as we age. We have half of the NAD by the time we are 50. He takes a gram of NMN (Nicotinamide MonoNucleotide) and takes half a gram resveratrol in the morning with yogurt. He is personally taking 1 gram of Metformin once a day at night.

2019-12-12: Caloric Restriction

the evidence as it stands weakly supports the conclusion that CR modestly extends human life. We expect that an individual engaging in 20-30% CR versus a normative, non-obesogenic diet without malnutrition might enjoy a 10%-20% increase in longevity. A 10%-15% CR relative to a normative diet may increase lifespan by perhaps 5-10%.

2019-12-31: State of antiaging

Progress towards the implementation of rejuvenation therapies is accelerating dramatically, ever faster with each passing year. While far from everyone is convinced that near term progress in addressing human aging is plausible, it is undeniable that we are far further ahead than even a few years ago. Even the public at large is beginning to catch on. While more foresightful individuals of past generations could do little more than predict a future of rejuvenation and extended healthy lives, we are in a position to make it happen.

2020-03-26: Age reversal in human cells

The treated cells appeared to be ~3 years younger on average than untreated cells from elderly people, with peaks of 3 years (in skin cells) and 7 years (in cells that line blood vessels).

2020-12-03: Epigenetic clocks

Sinclair’s focus in on analog information loss, the epigenetic noise that accumulates in the methylation patterns running along our DNA and disturbing its expression. This degradation is a biological clock of aging, and today’s results “tell us the clock doesn’t just represent time—it is time. If you wind the hands of the clock back, time also goes backward.”

“Harvard Medical School scientists have successfully restored vision in mice by turning back the clock on aged eye cells in the retina to recapture youthful gene function. The achievement represents the first successful attempt to reverse glaucoma-induced vision loss, rather than merely stem its progression

2020-12-04: Most brain aging decline can be fixed overnight

Common signs of neuronal aging disappeared literally overnight: neurons’ electrical activity became more sprightly and responsive to stimulation, and cells showed more robust connectivity with cells around them while also showing an ability to form stable connections with one another usually only seen in younger mice.

2022-12-02: Why do birds live so long?

Avian longevity may be linked to special adaptations in the biology of birds—including proteins to operate their highly efficient metabolisms and their remarkable ways of processing oxygen—that prevent tissue damage commonly associated with old age. In many animals, high body temperature, metabolic rates, and blood glucose levels indicate a shorter lifespan because these systems damage DNA in the mitochondria. But compared to other animals, birds are very good at protecting their mitochondrial DNA from the cellular damage associated with aging, which could contribute to their extensive lifespans. Studying birds could enhance our understanding of aging in humans, too, leading to advances in human health. “We want to know how nature has constructed things that resist aging better than we do. Otherwise, we’re left to our own ingenuity.”

2023-01-29: Epigenetic clocks have become more accurate and more universal

“A pan-tissue clock was paradoxical because methylation is supposed to control cell identity,” and remains fixed through adulthood. When Horvath and his colleagues established that epigenetic clocks counted time at the same pace across all tissues, whether that was quickly dividing blood cells or notoriously slow and highly differentiated brain neurons, the race was on to understand the fabric of time that the clocks are measuring. The universal clock, the key finding of Horvath’s 2022 paper, takes the pan-tissue clock one step further. It chimed the final stroke that unequivocally showed a predictable pattern to aging not only within the body of a single organism, but across mammals. These are clocks that hopefully are comprised of cytosines that truly have a causative role in the aging process. Of particular interest are “enhancer” regions of the genome, which exaggerate the role of certain genes by activating them to exorbitant levels.