The trauma of your ancestors may be carried in your gene’s memories.
Category: genetics – Page 452
Aging and chronic diseases share genetic factors, study reveals
The global population aged 60 or over is growing faster than all younger age groups and faces the tide of chronic diseases threatening their quality of life and posing challenges to healthcare and economy systems. To better understand the underlying biology behind healthspan — the healthy period of life before the first chronic disease manifestation — the scientists from Gero and MIPT collaborated with the researchers from PolyOmica, the University of Edinburgh and other institutes to analyze genetic data and medical histories of over 300,000 people aged 37 to 73 made available by UK Biobank.
The study published today in Communications Biology was lead by Dr. Peter Fedichev and Prof. Yurii Aulchenko. It shows that the most prevalent chronic conditions such as cancer, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, stroke, dementia, and some others apparently share the common underlying mechanism that is aging itself.
«According to Gompertz mortality law, the risk of death from all causes increases exponentially after the age of 40 and doubles approximately every 8 years», explains Peter Fedichev, founder and CSO of Gero. «By analyzing the dynamics of disease incidence in the clinical data available from UKB, we observed that the risks of age-related diseases grow exponentially with age and double at a rate compatible with the Gompertz mortality law. This close relation between the most prevalent chronic diseases and mortality suggests that their risks could be driven by the same process, that is aging. This is why healthspan can be used as a natural proxy for investigation of the genetic factors controlling the rate of aging, the “holy grail” target for anti-aging interventions».
Ira Pastor — Dr. Michael Lustgarten — IdeaXMe
Very excited to have interviewed Dr. Michael Lustgarten in my role as longevity / aging ambassador for the ideaXme Show — Mike has been at the forefront of studying the 100 trillion organisms present in the human microbiome, their effect on human health and wellness, as well as a major proponent of metabolomics and biologic age tracking — A true future thinker in the area of extending human lifespan and healthspan
Mollusk with magnetic teeth could be the key to nanoscale energy sources
A team of scientists have made a new discovery about naturally occurring magnetic materials, which in turn could lead to the development of nanoscale energy sources used to power next generation electronic devices. Researchers from Japan’s Okayama University and UC Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering worked together to study the gumboot chiton, a type of mollusk that produces teeth made of the magnetic mineral magnetite, in hopes of better understanding its genetic process.
A New Kind of Doctor’s Office
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Exploring the dark side of the genome
Dr. Rico explained: “When we compare human genomes from different people, we see that they are way more different than we initially expected when the Human Genome Project was declared to be ”completed” in 2003. One of the main contributions to these differences are the so called Copy Number Variable (CNV) regions. CNV regions are in different copy number depending on each individual, and their variability can be greater in some human populations than others. The number of copies of CNV regions can contribute to both normal phenotypic variability in the populations and susceptibility to certain diseases.
Research has shown a direct relationship between mutations in introns and variability in human populations.
One of the greatest challenges of genomics is to reveal what role the ”dark side” of the human genome plays: those regions where it has not yet been possible to find specific functions. The role that introns play within that immense part of the genome is especially mysterious. The introns, which represent almost half the size of the human genome, are constitutive parts of genes that alternate with regions that code for proteins, called exons.
Research published in PLOS Genetics, led by Alfonso Valencia, ICREA, director of the Life Sciences department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-National Supercomputing Center (BSC) and Dr. Daniel Rico of the Institute of Cellular Medicine, Newcastle University has analysed how introns are affected by copy number variants (CNV). CNVs are genomic variants that result in the presence (even in multiple copies) or absence of regions of the genome in different individuals.