Showing posts with label Longevity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Longevity. Show all posts

Spaced Out Worms – Clues To A Longer Life?


Life can be hard for a young nematode, even if you are one of the spaced out worms. They are frequently to be found on space missions, doing their best to go about their own wormy business in spite of strange surroundings, high G-forces and weightlessness, but these metazoans haven’t been seeking accolades or showing pride at being the first multicellular species to be genetically decoded.

In the current issue of Nature’s Scientific Reports, Honda et al report that their transgenic nematodes aged less when spaced out and zooming around the earth (1). The work is also the subject of a BBC report (2).

The team of scientists hatched a group of transgenic eggs and split them into two teams – one team were to get spaced out and the other to act as the control group. Note the transgenic bit was the addition of yellow fluorescent protein to act as a body-age indicator, and 40 days is a good old age for a nematode of the Caenorhabditis Elegans persuasion.

The experimental teams were busy doing their thing for 11 days and then they were peremptorily flash frozen – both in orbit and on terra firma. This allowed them to be stored and deconstructed at leisure.

Firstly, old worms have aggregates of a 35 molecule long polymer of the amino acid glutamine building up in their muscles. Our space team had less. But the second finding was at least as exciting after checking out their genes. Seven of them had been down regulated (suppressed) and these seven are intimately involved in life and death. So space travel had slowed the ageing process by changing the endocrine signaling.

Clearly the good news for the metazoan community is to line up for space patrol. For the rest of us simple creatures the outlook isn’t quite so good. We have things like bones that don’t do well in microgravity environs.

  1. http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120705/srep00487/full/srep00487.html
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18727012


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Retiring Mice


Flipping through the bio papers in the scientific literature, I seem to come across a very large number associated with aging – or its reversal and longevity. Of course we would all like to be long lived with the minimal amount of aging related lack of spryness. Many of the studies are associated in one way or another with our diet, and diet and exercise is what we are told to pay attention to when we visit the doctor if we can bring ourselves to do that.

Today’s post is about a helping retired mice grow older. The paper is by Matsumoto et al in the Public Library of Science (1). The retirees were all females who had spent the previous ten months raising litters. Male retirees couldn’t be considered for the study as they tend to be very, very, grumpy and fight all the time.

So, these old girls were allowed to enjoy their retirement for another eleven months with half of them fed on a probiotic diet. The good bacteria were from milk although the mice didn’t have access to live Greek yogurt, or any yogurt come to that. The good bacteria in the diet result in there being higher levels of polyamines in the colon.

The simplest polyamine is putrescine, so as you can imagine, these don’t smell too good, but they are important in body functions such as cell growth and the synthesis of our DNA and RNA. But they are also anti-inflammatory and this was at the root of the reason for the study. Is longevity increased if chronic low-grade inflammation is suppressed?

Those on the probiotic diet were longer lived and also ended up with better colons. So it’s just like your Mom told you about an apple a day, but now it’s take care of your colon and it’ll take care of you. I will be eating more live Greek yogurt and using lots more Soy sauce in my cooking and am looking forward to a long retirement (eventually).

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0023652

Happiness, The Prime Objective


Everything else being equal, if we feel happy, we live longer. Of course, everything else is usually not equal, but never mind, we need to maximize our feeling of wellbeing if we can. Other primates have similar problems with longevity. A large number are living in our zoos and so it is easy to check up on them. We have a choice about which zoo we live in. They do not.

Weiss, Adams and King from the Us of Edinburgh and Arizona (1) have followed a large number of Orangutans in zoological housing for a 7-year stretch. First of all, 174 of them were numerically rated as to their wellbeing.

This was necessarily a little subjective as it was based on the answers to a questionnaire. The BBC reports (2) that they had help from their caregivers at the zoos who were asked how happy they thought that they would be as an orangutan in their zoo for a week. They were also asked to fill in the questions on each orang’s personality and how much time they spent happy and enjoying themselves.

Over the 7-year period, 31 of the group died. In the wild they live to about 30, but in the zoological environment, 60 is more typical. The results of the study showed that the happiest ones lived about 11-years longer than the awkward, miserable ones.

Clearly we should take this message to heart. We already know that living in our highly developed human zoos, we have a much greater life expectancy than those living in the third world. But are we grinning enough? How do our keepers rate our wellbeing? Can you imagine the answers that they would write down when filling in our questionnaires for us? Maybe the next time we vote, we should think not just about life and liberty, but should also be upfront with the pursuit of happiness. You can’t pursue anything very effectively after you been well and truly screwed by the oligarchs, can you?

  1. http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/06/10/rsbl.2011.0543
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/13925983