Experiment Extends Cell Lifespan, but so What? By Brian Simpson
There has been what the media are reporting an anti-ageing breakthrough. As usual the research has been with simple organisms, in this case yeast cells. The researchers were able to increase the lifespan of the cells by interfering with a “toggle switch” in the cells that controlled cell life, by causing the cell to switch between two ageing pathways, and in effect not being able to make up its mind what to do. It is hypothesised that the same process could be done in other organisms. It is a long shot to think that this, while interesting, is presenting some sort of fountain of youth for humans. Yeast are a fungus, and a much simpler organism than any animal. It is not known if the switching trick would work in an animal organism, or even plants, and if there could be cancer effects from it, actually lowering lifespan. So, the claim “I don’t see why it cannot be applied to more complex organisms,” remains unjustified.
“I don’t see why it cannot be applied to more complex organisms,” said the study’s senior author.
Scientists have achieved a significant breakthrough in the effort to slow the aging process with a novel technique that increased the lifespans of yeast cells by a whopping 82 percent, reports a new study.
By programming cells to constantly switch between two aging pathways, researchers were able to prevent them from fully committing to either deteriorative process, a method that nearly doubled the lifespan of the cells. In other words, rather than the entire cell aging at once, the aging process was toggled between different physical parts of the organism, extending its life. This synthetic “toggle switch” offers a potential roadmap toward treatments that could one day extend human longevity, though that future is highly speculative at this time.
We are born, we age, we die—so goes the story of humanity since time immemorial. However, this familiar progression could be shaken up by enormous advances in genetics that have opened new windows into the underlying biological mechanisms that cause us to age, raising the possibility that they could be rewired to extend our lifespans.
Now, a team of scientists at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), have developed a new solution to this age-old problem that essentially tricks cells into waffling between two common deteriorative processes in cells. Using synthetic biology, the researchers genetically reprogrammed a circuit that chooses between these divergent paths toward death, causing it to constantly oscillate between its fates instead of actually dedicating itself to one.
These “oscillations increased cellular lifespan through the delay of the commitment to aging,” a result that establishes “a connection between gene network architecture and cellular longevity that could lead to rationally designed gene circuits that slow aging,” according to a study published on Thursday in Science.
“The circuit resembles a toggle switch that drives the fate decision and progression toward aging and death,” said Nan Hao, a professor of molecular biology at UCSD and a senior author of the study, in an email to Motherboard.
“Once the fate of a cell is determined, then it will have accelerated damage accumulation and progression to death,” continued Hao, who also serves as co-director of UCSD’s Synthetic Biology Institute. “[I]t became obvious to us that if we could rewire this naturally-occurring toggle switch circuit to an oscillator, it will make the cell to cycle between the two pre-destined aging paths and prevent the cell from making this fate decision toward deterioration and death, and it will make the cell live longer.”
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh4872
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