Scientists find genes for youth in worms
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Aging Cell: Youth genes found in roundworms
Scientists at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada have found a pair of youth genes in nematodes that are important in clearing cells of toxins that accumulate over time and are thought to be the cause of aging. About it writes the magazine Aging Cell.
Screening of the Caenorhabditis elegans genome was carried out. The goal of the experiment was to determine which of the 20,000 genes that were blocked made the nematodes susceptible to the effects of the heavy metal cadmium and the neurotoxin acrylamide.
Both of these substances mimicked the stress that cells experience during aging.
It turned out that blocking the CCF-1 and PAL-1 genes using the RNA interference method led to the fact that nematodes, whose lifespan reaches 2-3 weeks, lived half as long as usual. Roundworms were hypersensitive to even mild levels of stressors that cause neurodegeneration.
It is noted that despite the fact that the study was conducted on nematodes, approximately 40% of their genes, including CCF-1 and PAL-1, are evolutionarily related to human genes with a similar function. In humans, the CCF-1 equivalent is called CNOT7 and the PAL-1 equivalent is called Cdx2.
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