It’s not just genes — parents can pass down longevity another way

 



HHMI Janelia Research Campus Senior Group Leader Meng Wang and her team study longevity. They've shown that by overexpressing an enzyme in the lysosomes of the roundworm C. elegans, they can extend the worm's life by up to 60 percent.

But surprisingly, the team found the worms' progeny without this genetic modification were still living longer than normal. When they crossed their long-lived worms with "wild-type" worms that weren't overexpressing the enzyme -- a routine lab procedure used to wipe clean any genetic manipulations -- they saw that the offspring also lived longer than normal worms. Somehow, the longevity markers were being transferred from generation to generation, even four generations later.

In new research, Wang and her team uncover how changes in the worm's lysosomes that promote longevity are transferred from cells in its body to its reproductive cells through histones -- proteins that play a key role in organizing and regulating DNA. In reproductive cells, these histone messengers cause modifications in the worm's epigenome -- a collection of chemical tags that regulate gene expression -- enabling the lysosomal changes to be passed from generation to generation without changing the underlying DNA.

The findings have repercussions well beyond longevity. Epigenetic modifications can help organisms cope with many different types of environmental stressors -- from diet changes to pollutant exposure to psychological stress -- and the new work shows how these advantages could be conferred from parents to their offspring.

#Genetics
#GeneExpression
#DNAResearch
#MolecularBiology
#Genomics
#GeneticEngineering
#GeneTherapy
#CRISPR
#HumanGenome
#GeneticScience

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