I probably take this blog too seriously. No, I definitely do. I am trying to make it like some serious review of the literature, and as a result, my true opinion is getting lost in the midst, and this is a shame. It should be what it is, and that is gloriously a blog.
I did [...]
Continue reading about On Grad School, Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, Aging, and Biology
According to a recent article in U.S. News and World Report there are 3 paths in creating pills of youth. Here is a quick summary of each of them.
1. Find drugs which mimic the benefits of caloric restriction. This would be things like resveratrol, and work by Sitrus pharmaceuticals.
2. Looking for clues in the very old. [...]
Continue reading about 2 Popular paths to creating Pills of Youth
While the exact causes of mammalian aging are not known, the decline in replicative capacity of cells appears to be a factor. Activation of a particular gene, p16INK4a, causes the cell to arrest in a state of senescence at once suppressing cancer while attenuating its ability to replicate. Thus p16 may function via aging as [...]
Continue reading about A Mathematical Model of p16INK4a and Aging
Specific organ functions rely on differentiated cells. How differentiated
cells are replaced is a fundamental question in biology
with important implications for regenerative medicine.
So begins a recent paper in Cell which has shown heart cells in rodents can be stimulated to proliferate, thus repairing any damage. Typically the heart stops proliferating or regenerating shortly after birth, so [...]
Continue reading about How to heal a broken heart? It is all in the signals proteins are sending
I just got done reading a Nature interview of Elaine Fuchs, who does stem cell research at Rockerfeller University in NYC. Specifically she focuses on how skin stem cells act to maintain and repair the skin.
As I read the article, I found myself asking a lot of questions, that seem obvious but that I rarely [...]
Continue reading about How exactly does the body renew itself? We don’t really know.
Before August Weismann, the explanation of how a human body developed and then later aggregated sexual material for reproduction was dominated by Charles Darwin’s theory of of Pangenesis. The theory basically stated that every cell in the body emitted hundreds of tiny germ like materials, called “gemmules”. These gemmules then aggregated in the reproductive organs, [...]
Continue reading about Discovering the Germ Line: Architects of Soma
The human body is a factory producing trillions of new blood cells daily, and replacing the lining of the small intestine on a weekly basis. The raw materials in production are stem cells, which have the ability both to create cells used by our body, and to create copies of themselves.
To ensure quality of production, [...]
Continue reading about Immortality or Aging? Cancer or Senescence?
What makes a disease a disease? Why isn’t aging, a condition which results in the slow decline of the body, considered a disease? It seems so obvious.
Part of the problem is where to define the line between “good aging” (i.e. development) and “bad aging” (i.e. degeneration)? Looking at the Gompertz curve, one might say the [...]
Continue reading about What defines a disease, and why isn’t aging included?
I just finished an entry for the SOA timeline on the 1970s discovery that nematodes collect inactive enzymes and molecules as they grow older. The main idea being that the body is unable to clear out the junk inside cells and that the energy cost of carrying this junk leads to senescence, or aging.
The theory [...]
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In recent paper published in Aging Cell, Dr. Sharpless out of the UNC Medical School reported that expression of protein p16INK4a appeared to increase exponentially with chronological age. Expression was measured in human blood and was found highest in peripheral blood T-lymphocytes (PBTL).
The discovery is exciting as it creates a relatively easy way to measure [...]
Continue reading about To know your molecular age measure your p16ink4a
