Zebrafish live for less than a year, but new research finds that extending the length of the chromosomes in their guts kept them healthy into old age.
When it comes to slowing aging in humans, telomeres have long been a tempting target. These complex, repetitive sequences of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes tick away the years by shortening each time a cell divides, eventually causing the cell to die.about whether reversing this shortening could be a molecular fountain of youth, but a new study in zebrafish is encouraging.
Researchers have long been interested in telomerase as an antiaging treatment. Some evidence suggests, curbing everything from the appearance of gray hair to cognitive decline. But treating people with telomerase would be risky because of the chance of causing cancer, as well as the difficulty of getting the enzyme into every cell in the body.
The intestinal wall of fish without telomerase becomes inflamed; restoring telomerase brings it back to health .Next, the researchers compared these fish’s gastrointestinal tracts with those of fish they had injected with pieces of messenger RNA encoding an enzyme that reactivates the disabled telomerase gene in the gut. These fish had also received a piece of DNA encoding an extra telomerase gene in the same organ.
On average, treated fish lived 40% longer than those that lacked telomerase entirely and remained healthier during their old age with more cell proliferation in the kidneys and testes. When the researchers looked at the guts of normal elderly fish who had been engineered with an extra gene for telomerase in the gut, the extra amount of the enzyme also greatly improved their overall health and eliminated signs of aging in their guts.
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