Recognizing the Dynamics of Aging Process

A DNA region known as VNTR2-1 that prevents aging in certain types of cells is identified from a new study led by researchers at Washington State University.

The human body is made up of trillions of living cells. Aging occurs as cells age, which happens when those cells eventually stop replicating and dividing.

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‘Identifying the 'junk DNA' sequence, VNTR2-1 in telomere gene will be the key to understand the aging process.’

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Scientists have long known that genes influence how cells age and how long humans live, but how exactly it works remained unclear.

Knowing about the regulation and activation of telomerase gene is the key to understand the process of aging in humans.That is why researchers solely focused on the study of this gene.

The new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)shows that discovery of VNTR2-1 gene region that helps to drive the activity of the telomerase gene is notable because of the type of DNA sequence it represents.

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"Almost 50% of our genome consists of repetitive DNA that does not code for protein. These DNA sequences tend to be considered as 'junk DNA' or dark matters in our genome, and they are difficult to study”, said Jiyue Zhu, a professor in the College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

This study finding is based on a series of experiments that discovered that deleting the DNA sequence from cancer cells both in a human cell line and in mice caused telomeres to shorten, cells to age, and tumors to stop growing.

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Subsequently, a study that looked at the length of the sequence in DNA samples taken from Caucasian and African American centenarians and control participants in the Georgia Centenarian Study, a study that followed a group of people aged 100 or above between 1988 and 2008.

The researchers found that the length of the sequence ranged from as short as 53 repeats -- or copies -- of the DNA to as long as 160 repeats.

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Since very short sequences were found only in African American participants, they looked more closely at that group and found that there were relatively few centenarians with a short VNTR2-1 sequence as compared to control participants.

However, researchers also think that having a shorter sequence does not necessarily mean your lifespan will be shorter, because it means the telomerase gene is less active. If the telomere length is shorter, those people are less likely to develop cancer.

As African Americans have been in the United States for generations, many of them have Caucasian ancestors from whom they may have inherited some of this sequence. So as a next step, research team hope to study the sequence in an African population.

Source-Medindia