Mexico City.- Scientists at Harvard University (EU) have reached a key milestone in learning to reverse aging after a series of experiments with mice. In work 13 years in the making, published this week in the journal Cell, genetics professor David Sinclair and his team realize that not only can they manipulate the aging of rodents in an accelerated period of time, but they can also reverse the effects of such a process and restore some of the biological signs of youth in animals.
While it’s often assumed that aging is the result of genetic mutations that cause our bodies to deteriorate and die, Sinclair believes that’s not the case.
The study demonstrates for the first time that degradation in the way DNA is organized and regulated, known as epigenetics, can cause aging in an organism, independent of changes in the genetic code itself. Sinclair has long proposed that aging results from the loss of critical instructions cells need to continue to function, in what he calls the “Information Theory of Aging.”
To test their hypothesis, they mimicked the effects of aging on the epigenome by introducing breaks in the DNA of young mice. Once ‘aged’ in this way, within weeks the animals were observed to begin to show signs of advanced age: gray fur, lower body weight despite an unaltered diet, reduced activity and increased frailty.
The researchers then gave the mice a gene therapy that reversed the epigenetic changes caused by the DNA breaks. As a result, aged and blind mice regained their sight and developed younger, more intelligent brains.
“It’s like restarting a computer that’s not working properly,” Sinclair said. He also asserted that his work supports the hypothesis that mammalian cells maintain a kind of backup copy of epigenetic ‘software’ that, when accessed, can allow an aged and epigenetically scrambled cell to reboot itself to a more stable state. healthy and youthful.
