Saturday, April 11, 2015

Can Fish Help Us Understand the Mystery of Aging

In the article, “In Short-Lived Fish, Secrets to Aging”, that was published in The New York Times researchers were looking into how the turquoise killifish could help understand the aging process and how to potentially find a way to increase life spans. The turquoise killifish have the shortest life span of any vertebrates, they grow to maturity in 40 days and mate and lay eggs and by the time they do that the pond dries up and the fish are dead. Even when they keep them in aquariums they still died within a couple of months. They do not have premature deaths, but just have compressed life spans. They are ideal for this experiment because they have short life spans and they are very similar to humans in the aging process. They have tested in mice and they found that SRT1720 extended the mice lives, on average, by 8.8%. But the mice still live too long, which slows down the research process, so they tiny nematodes, which were not a perfect organism because they did not have a skeleton.

Anne Brunet’s graduate student suggested she use turquoise killifish and that is how it all started. They found out that the fish loses muscle mass while aging, stop producing eggs, have a weaken immune system and even have memory problems. They did an entire genome sequence and located the genes that are known for aging processes. They used a technique called Crispr, which could replace DNA with a different one. With that technique they altered the gene TERT that protects telomeres. They think that as telomeres get shorter the aging processes increases and had a link to aging. After the TERT alteration they makes became infertile and females less eggs, atrophied, and had less blood cells, but never died any sooner than their expected life span. They plan on continuing the research in order to find out potential anti-aging treatments for the fish and then hopefully be able to convert it for humans.

This is not normally an article I would attract to, but I was surprisingly very interesting in this topic. If they could find a treatment to increase life span it can be very beneficial for the whole human race. Although they are not there yet, if they keep working, it has a lot of potential. Another thing that I like about the article was that it mentioned that the graduate student was the one to mention the turquoise killifish, although they did say their name, just the recognition that they had suggested it was nice. The world is very into living longer and looking younger, so this could potentially be the answer to that, but we will have to wait and see.

1 comment:

  1. This is great research! As a marine biology major I love fish. However I did not know that this certain killifish had such a short live span! I also found it interesting that they exhibit similar signs of aging as humans do, even though they are not mammals.

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