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Category: genetics – Page 221

The fountain of youth is … a T cell?

“If we give it to aged mice, they rejuvenate. If we give it to young mice, they age slower. No other therapy right now can do this.”

The fountain of youth has eluded explorers for ages. It turns out the magic anti-aging elixir might have been inside us all along.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Assistant Professor Corina Amor Vegas and colleagues have discovered that T cells can be reprogrammed to fight aging, so to speak. Given the right set of genetic modifications, these white blood cells can attack another group of cells known as senescent cells. These cells are thought to be responsible for many of the diseases we grapple with later in life.

Senescent cells are those that stop replicating. As we age, they build up in our bodies, resulting in harmful inflammation. While several drugs currently exist that can eliminate these cells, many must be taken repeatedly over time.

Breakthrough: Deaf Boy Can Hear After First Gene Treatment in US

His father’s voice, the sounds of passing cars and scissors clipping his hair: An 11-year-old boy is hearing for the first time in his life after receiving a breakthrough gene therapy.

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) which carried out the treatment – a first in the United States – said in a statement Tuesday the milestone represents hope for patients around the world with hearing loss caused by genetic mutations.

Aissam Dam was born “profoundly deaf” because of a highly rare abnormality in a single gene.

T Cells May Be The Living Anti-Aging Elixir

The fountain of youth has eluded explorers for ages.

Summary: Researchers found that T cells can be genetically reprogrammed to target and eliminate senescent cells, which contribute to aging-related diseases. By using CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T cells in mice, they achieved significant health improvements including lower body weight, enhanced metabolism, and increased physical activity.

This groundbreaking approach, offering long-term effects from a single treatment, could revolutionize treatments for age-related conditions like obesity and diabetes, transcending the potential of CAR T cells beyond their current use in cancer therapy.

Recent advances in the evolution of aging and lifespan

Aging is a common phenomenon among organisms, however, lifespan tends to vary across different species to a significant extent among vertebrates themselves. Aging occurs due to the gradual increase in DNA damage, disruption of cellular organelles, deregulation of protein function, disrupted metabolism and oxidative stress [1].

Longevity. Technology: The differences in lifespan are driven by trade-offs and evolutionary trajectories in the genomes of organisms. Age-specific selection also impacts allele (variations of a gene) frequencies in a population. This in turn impacts environment-specific mortality risk and disease susceptibility. Moreover, mutational processes are influenced by life history and age in both somatic and germline cells.

Now, a new review published in Trends in Genetics discusses recent advances in the evolution of aging at population, organismal and cellular scales.

Harnessing skin cancer genes to heal hearts

Biomedical engineers at Duke University have demonstrated that one of the most dangerous mutations found in skin cancers might moonlight as a pathway to mending a broken heart.

The genetic mutation in the protein BRAF, a part of the MAPK signaling pathway that can promote cell division, is one of the most common and most aggressive found in melanoma patients. In a new study, researchers show that introducing this mutation to rat heart tissue grown in a laboratory can induce growth.

Repairing after a is the “holy grail” of heart research, complicated by the fact that heart tissue does not regenerate on its own. One potential strategy would be to persuade to divide by safely delivering a therapeutic gene to patients and fully controlling its activity in the heart.

Alcohol Changes How Your Brain’s Genes Work. Changing Them Back May Fight Addiction

Many people are wired to seek and respond to rewards. Your brain interprets food as rewarding when you are hungry and water as rewarding when you are thirsty.

But addictive substances like alcohol and drugs of abuse can overwhelm the natural reward pathways in your brain, resulting in intolerable cravings and reduced impulse control.

A popular misconception is that addiction is a result of low willpower. But an explosion of knowledge and technology in the field of molecular genetics has changed our basic understanding of addiction drastically over the past decade. The general consensus among scientists and health care professionals is that there is a strong neurobiological and genetic basis for addiction.

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