Ageing seems to affect cellular processes in the same way across five very different kinds of life — humans, fruit flies, rats, mice and worms — according to a study published in Nature on 12 April. The findings could help to explain what drives ageing and offer suggestions for how to reverse it.
“It opens up a really fundamental new area of understanding how and why we age,” says Lindsay Wu, a biochemist at UNSW Sydney in Australia.
As animals age, a variety of molecular processes inside cells become less reliable — gene mutations become more frequent, and the ends of chromosomes snap off, making them shorter. Many studies have explored ageing’s effects on gene expression, but few have investigated how it affects transcription — the process whereby genetic information is copied from a blueprint DNA strand to RNA molecules — says Andreas Beyer, a computational biologist at the University of Cologne in Germany.
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