Year 2017 This is essentially the mechanism for plant immortality.
RNA-directed DNA methylation (RdDM) activity in the Arabidopsis thaliana male sexual lineage that regulates gene expression in meiocytes. Loss of sexual-lineage-specific RdDM causes mis-splicing of the MPS1 gene (also known as PRD2), thereby disrupting meiosis. Our results establish a regulatory paradigm in which de novo methylation creates a cell-lineage-specific epigenetic signature that controls gene expression and contributes to cellular function in flowering plants.
Year 2017 Basically the tardigrade is the most promising set of genes on any creature due to many types of survival genes like going years without food or even genes for radiation resistance which could be used in crispr to augment human genes.
Tardigrades — aka water bears or moss piglets — are perhaps the most resilient creatures on the planet, able to survive complete dehydration, space vacuum and being frozen. However, only recently have scientists begun to unravel the genes that underpin the tardigrade’s biological superpowers. “They’re 0.2mm to 1mm in length and despite being so small they are able to do all these things we cannot,” says Mark Blaxter, a biologist at the University of Edinburgh who has been studying tardigrades for 20 years. “In their DNA, they hold a cornucopia of secrets.”
With Kazurahu Arakawa, from the University of Keio, Japan, Blaxter recently analysed the first true tardigrade genome. The results, published today in the open access journal PLOS Biology, are a first step towards explaining the genetics underpinning the tardigrade’s extraordinary resilience and to pinpoint its place within the evolutionary tree of life. We spoke to Blaxter about his new research and his fascination for this remarkable little animal.
**WIRED:**How come we are only now able to analyse the tardigrade’s true genomes?
I saw a Twitter thread about Bryan Johnson’s ‘Blueprint’, claiming that he’d made himself biologically younger with a highly optimised combination of diet, supplements and exercise. What could that mean? And should we all start chugging 25 pills a day to start on the Blueprint ourselves? Probably not…but the biology behind it is surprisingly interesting.
*Chapters*
00:00 A tweet goes viral. 00:44 Getting ‘biologically younger’ 01:23 NAD levels. 03:09 Maximum heart rate. 04:12 Epigenetic clocks. 07:12 Step 1: the Blueprint diet. 09:23 Step 2: ALL THE SUPPLEMENTS 11:43 Step 3: track progress. 12:40 Conclusion.
*Sources and further reading*
My book, Ageless: The new science of getting older without getting old, goes into far more depth about rapamycin, metformin and epigenetic clocks, and lots more! https://ageless.link/
Research from the Babraham Institute has developed a method to “time jump” human skin cells by 30 years, turning back the aging clock for cells without losing their specialized function. Work by researchers in the Institute’s Epigenetics research program has been able to partly restore the function of older cells, as well as rejuvenating the molecular measures of biological age. The research is published today in the journal eLife, and while this topic is still at an early stage of exploration, it could revolutionize regenerative medicine.
What is regenerative medicine?
As we age, our cells’ ability to function declines and the genome accumulates marks of aging. Regenerative biology aims to repair or replace cells including old ones. One of the most important tools in regenerative biology is our ability to create “induced” stem cells. The process is a result of several steps, each erasing some of the marks that make cells specialized. In theory, these stem cells have the potential to become any cell type, but scientists aren’t yet able to reliably recreate the conditions to re-differentiate stem cells into all cell types.
TALK ABSTRACT Life was solving problems in metabolic, genetic, physiological, and anatomical spaces long before brains and nervous systems appeared. In this talk, I will describe remarkable capabilities of cell groups as they create, repair, and remodel complex anatomies. Anatomical homeostasis reveals that groups of cells are collective intelligences; their cognitive medium is the same as that of the human mind: electrical signals propagating in cell networks. I will explain non-neural bioelectricity and the tools we use to track the basal cognition of cells and tissues and control their function for applications in regenerative medicine. I will conclude with a discussion of our framework based on evolutionary scaling of intelligence by pivoting conserved mechanisms that allow agents, whether designed or evolved, to navigate complex problem spaces.
Some of Earth’s weirdest fungi, including types of lichen, mycorrhizal, and insect symbiotes, never quite seemed to fit in our current tree of life.
But a new genetic analysis discovered that despite the extreme differences between these oddballs, they actually all belong together on an entirely new branch that parted ways with other fungi more than 300 million years ago.
“I like to think of these as the platypus and echidna of the fungal world,” says University of Alberta mycologist Toby Spribille, because of the fungi’s peculiar traits.
We review the salient evidence consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology. Much of this physical and biological evidence is multifactorial. One particular focus are the recent studies which date the emergence of the complex retroviruses of vertebrate lines at or just before the Cambrian Explosion of ∼500 Ma. Such viruses are known to be plausibly associated with major evolutionary genomic processes. We believe this coincidence is not fortuitous but is consistent with a key prediction of H-W theory whereby major extinction-diversification evolutionary boundaries coincide with virus-bearing cometary-bolide bombardment events. A second focus is the remarkable evolution of intelligent complexity (Cephalopods) culminating in the emergence of the Octopus. A third focus concerns the micro-organism fossil evidence contained within meteorites as well as the detection in the upper atmosphere of apparent incoming life-bearing particles from space. In our view the totality of the multifactorial data and critical analyses assembled by Fred Hoyle, Chandra Wickramasinghe and their many colleagues since the 1960s leads to a very plausible conclusion – life may have been seeded here on Earth by life-bearing comets as soon as conditions on Earth allowed it to flourish (about or just before 4.1 Billion years ago); and living organisms such as space-resistant and space-hardy bacteria, viruses, more complex eukaryotic cells, fertilised ova and seeds have been continuously delivered ever since to Earth so being one important driver of further terrestrial evolution which has resulted in considerable genetic diversity and which has led to the emergence of mankind.
The event, which was held at a luxury resort in the Swiss Alps last week, drew some of the world’s richest people along with some of its most controversial scientists.
Harvard Medical School genetics professor George Church, SENS Research Foundation chief of science offices Aubrey de Grey, Buck Institute for Research on Aging president and CEO Eric Verdin, Institute for Ageing Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine director Nir Barzilai, Forever Healthy Foundation founder Michael Greve, Human Longevity Inc. associate professor, internal medicine Evelyne Yehudit Bischof, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine Alex Zhavoronkov, creator of First Longevity and Longevity. Technology editor-in-chief Phil Newman, and Wei-Wu He, executive chairman of Human Longevity Inc., CEO and chairman of Casi Pharmaceuticals Inc., and founder and chairman of Genetron Health.
According to MIT Technology Review, Mega-Rich investors met with scientists and biotech founders in a swanky resort town of Gstaad, Switzerland, to advance the “longevity science,” which is a new field that could extend human life spans. The conference included some of the richest investors and entrepreneurs on earth.
CGT are composed of a diverse group of medicinal products. Cell therapies (including ex vivo gene therapies) involve the transfer of cells with a relevant function into the patient. Cells can have different origins, i.e., human (autologous or allogeneic), different differentiation stages, i.e., stem cells or differentiated cells, and can be genetically modified to exert the intended therapeutic effect. In genetically modified cell therapy, a functional transgene is transfected into cells ex vivo using viral (for example, lentiviruses) or nonviral (e.g., electroporation) vectors. Next, the modified cells are administered to the patient where the transgene will promote a therapeutic effect. Examples of these therapies include chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells and genetically modified human stem cells (HSCs).
This article highlights the importance of measuring potency for cell and gene therapies.
