14 DAY TRIAL // It looks like scientists aren't quite ready to put the idea of finding the fountain of youth behind them. This time, they're looking into the possibility of toying with DNA in order to considerably increase the average individual's lifespan.
A paper recently published in the journal Cell Reports details how, by altering the DNA of several mice, a team of scientists was able to make the animals live some 20% longer than they normally would have.
The researchers explain that, as part of their experiments, they lowered the expression of a gene that has been previously documented to play a major part in balancing energy and metabolism.
This gene is known to the scientific community as mTOR, Daily Mail reports.
Once this gene was no longer allowed to manifest itself as nature intended, the rodents experience a noteworthy increase in their life expectancy.
Thus, scientists say that females lived to reach the age of 31.5 months, whereas the males died when they were about 28 months old.
By comparison, normal female and male mice die of old age at 26.5 months and 22.9 months, respectively.
What's interesting it that all the mice whose lifespan the researchers managed to prolong did not show any sings of losing their memory or having balance issues when in old age.
However, they did develop several health issues such as bone deterioration and a weaker immune system, which made them more susceptible to infections.
Besides, they did not grew as big as the normal mice did.
This proves that aging is not uniform, and that each organ degrades according to its own internal clock.
“While the high extension in lifespan is noteworthy, this study reinforces an important facet of ageing; it is not uniform.”
“Rather, similar to circadian rhythms, an animal might have several organ-specific aging clocks that generally work together to govern the aging of the whole organism,” Dr. Toren Finkel says.
The researchers plan to carry out further investigation and determine whether or not the findings of these experiments could help roll out better treatment options for age-related medical conditions such as Alzheimer’s.