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Credit: https://longevity.technology/news/agings-ground-zero-could-become-rejuvenation-clinical-target/

New Epigenetic Clocks Offer Insight Into Cellular Aging

August 3, 2021

  • Scientists have discovered new methods for measuring the biological age
  • Biological aging refers to cellular biochemical processes and is different from traditional aging
  • In their research, scientists found that for the first few days of growth, the cells of an embryo don’t age, spurring new research into age-related therapies.
Humans tend to count their revolutions around the sun to measure their age, while on a cellular level, aging is calculated differently. Epigeneticists are scientists who study how the environment impacts our genes. Recently, epigenetic researchers identified several “epigenetic clocks” in human cells that can report a cell’s epigenetic age. Knowing an exact age is important for identifying age-related processes that reduce cellular function. Steve Horvath, a professor of genetics and biostatistics at UCLA, discovered the first epigenetic clock. Dr. Horvath and his team used the clock, known as the rDNAm clock, to measure the age of cells in mouse embryos. The team discovered a peculiar result; 6 or 7 days after the experiment began, the embryo cells showed a lower epigenetic age than in earlier stages of cell development, indicating that the cell’s epigenetic aging had been slowed or reversed. Dr. Horvath repeated his experiment using four epigenetic clocks and received similar results. The evidence suggested that cells stop aging in the early stages of embryogenesis. Longer experiments revealed that cells resume aging around day 10 or 11. The researchers defined day 6 or 7 embryo growth as the minimum epigenetic age, suggesting that cells less than six days old do not experience biological aging. The observations by Dr. Horvath and others offer new directions for clinical research into the effects of aging. Accurate epigenetic clocks not only provide researchers with a method to correlate cellular aging with real-life aging factors but could also offer physicians a viable treatment for age-related disorders. Animal studies already support this; researchers have successfully increased the lifespan of mice by extending the telomeres of the mouse’s cells. Telomeres attach to the ends of cellular DNA, and if they are too short, they can cause errors in DNA transcription. By extending the telomeres, scientists can increase lifespan and quality of life.  Credit: https://longevity.technology/news/agings-ground-zero-could-become-rejuvenation-clinical-target/ 

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