Do sex cells hold the secret to long life?





The se­cret of long life may lurk with­in the ge­net­ic ac­ti­vity pro­file of sex cellssuch as the sperm and eggs of hu­mans, a pa­per newly pub­lished in the re­search jour­nal Na­ture sug­gests.


Sex cells, and the line­age of cells that de­vel­op in­to them, are im­mor­tal in the sense that once they are used to cre­ate a new or­gan­ism, they dont die. In­stead they br­ing about the pro­duc­tion of all the new crea­tures cells, in­clud­ing more sex cells.


Only the non-sex cell­scalled so­mat­ic cellsare doomed to age and die, typ­ic­ally by ac­cu­mu­lating dam­age, de­bris and muta­t­ions.


Gary Ru­vkun, a ge­net­icist at Har­vard Med­i­cal School, and col­leagues found in the new study that the gene ac­ti­vity in so­mat­ic cells of long-lived nem­a­tode worm mu­tants re­sem­bles that of germ­line, or sex cells. Switch­ing to germline char­ac­ter­is­tics may there­fore con­fer health ben­e­fits and longe­vity to these mu­tant worms, ac­cord­ing to Ru­vkuns team.


The si­m­i­lar­ity in the so­mat­ic cells gene ac­ti­vity pro­file to that of sex cells largely in­volved de­crease in a pat­tern of chem­i­cal ac­ti­vity known as insulin-like sig­nal­ling, ac­cord­ing to the re­search­ers.


The al­tered ge­net­ic ac­ti­vity al­so made the non-sex cells more re­sist­ant to tox­icity, the group re­ported. This makes sense, they added, be­cause some the­o­ries hold that ag­ing evolved as a trade-off in which or­gan­isms di­verted re­sources to­ward main­tain­ing and pro­tect­ing the re­pro­duc­tive cells at the ex­pense of the oth­ers.


"Given that pro­tec­tion of the germ line is an ev­o­lu­tionarily shared trait across spe­cies, it will be in­ter­est­ing to in­ves­t­i­gate wheth­er this is a broadly con­served mech­an­ism of mod­u­lat­ing life­span" for oth­er an­i­mals, in­clud­ing hu­mans, wrote the sci­en­tists.


"The idea that so­mat­ic cells main­tain the po­ten­tial to re­ac­quire path­ways lost dur­ing dif­fer­entia­t­ion [genera­t­ion of new cells] is tan­ta­liz­ing," they added, and may help re­search­ers de­vel­op ther­a­peu­tics to as­sist in cel­lu­lar re­pair and pos­sibly re­genera­t­ion.


The paper appears in the June 8 ad­vance on­line issue of the jour­nal.

World Science staff: June 7, 2009

If I thought I was going to live forever I'd kill myself but I would rather die before I would commit suicide!

It depends on your age, Bob!

If you live forever, for example, as young Mike Tyson, then life will be wonderful!

By the way, what do you make of Lorena Babbitt's smile?
Is it as attractive as Mona Lisa's smile or what?

"By the way, what do you make of Lorena Babbitt's smile?
Is it as attractive as Mona Lisa's smile or what?"

Mona's is a smile of amusement, Lorena's is a smile of satisfaction. From my, (male) point of view Lorena's is more scary than attractive.

Lorena's SMILE would not be scary, Bob, if you just imagine it after being done away with young Cincirob's!

So, where is Stanley? Out accumulating sex cells? He won't find any, they have become "gender cells," and are only found in the construction of sentences.