How organisms age, and what determines their lifespan, is one of the basic questions of biology. It is also a major area of biopharmaceutical interest. Partly, this is because most people want to delay shuffling off this mortal coil for as long as possible.
Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Science (IMS) and Keio University School of Medicine (KUSM) in Japan have discovered that people ages 110 or longer, the so-called supercentenarians, have elevated blood levels of CD4+ cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs).
Two very different roles were reported for the protein REST last week. In adults, REST activation appeared to extend lifespan by reducing overall brain activity. Principal investigator Bruce Yankner, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging, told BioWorld that in postmortem brain samples of individuals who had had no cognitive impairments at the time of their death, his team found "a correlation between down-regulation of excitation and extended longevity."
Telomerase's reputation is that it has an important role in maintaining the ability of stem cells to divide through maintaining telomeres, the structures at the tips of chromosomes that shorten with each replication cycle.
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