Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Activating a Single Gene Could Extend Life Span



Full Article

The UCLA conducted an experiment on 100,000 fruit flies. The scientists activated the gene AMPK and extended the life span of the flies by 1/3. The fruit flies with the activated gene lived for about eight weeks, while their normal life span is about six weeks. The gene activates a process called autophagy which allows cells to get rid of "junk DNA" that accumulates as we age and causes damage to the cells. In humans the AMPK gene is inactive and if activated the average life span for a human could come to be as high as 101 years as opposed to the current average of 78. The gene can be activated in different parts of the body and may serve as a treatment for diseases such as Alzheimer's, cancer, diabetes, and stroke. There are still many years to go before this process will be ready for human treatments but the prospects are promising.

I found this article to be particularly interesting because of our labs in the beginning of this semester with our own fruit flies. As we know fruit flies are an ideal test subject because their genome is completely sequenced, it's easy to go through many generations in a short period of time, and there are no ethics issues with using fruit flies in the lab. It's also interesting that we share certain genes with fruit flies and that tests done on them can make progress in the medical field. I'm looking forward to seeing the progress this and other studies like them make in the coming years.

No comments:

Post a Comment