Longevity It can be inherited

Almost everyone would want to live longer. Longevity is influenced by a healthy lifestyle and a supportive environment. However, longevity can lowered to the next generation who have a condition far different from today? Apparently scientists show it is not impossible.

The researchers found that blocking or modifying any of the three key proteins in DNA can enhance the long life of animals and their offspring, although modifications to the original cell no longer exists in the DNA of the offspring. The world's first findings showed that longevity can be inherited by non-genetically for several generations.



Further investigation is still much needed, but this research can be a clue as to the possibility that the modification of DNA that occur in our great-grandparents may affect the long life of our own.

"This study relates to the idea of ​​inheritance of traits that is almost perverse because it has long been deprived by law of Mendel. But we have shown through this study that the inheritance of longevity in roundworms occur through the alteration of certain proteins," says professor of genetics, Anne Brunet, PhD. , author of the study.

Anne Brunet, assisted by Eric Greer at Stanford University before finding specimens roundworms that live 20 to 30 percent longer than usual. This long-lived worms have a mutation that impairs the ability of DNA proteins that help control gene activity.

The question is whether the alteration of protein DNA can be inherited effect? Greer then design an experiment to determine whether the worms that do not have mutations in the gene can still inherit his long life.

"I do not really expect to be inherited. Therefore, I think that the mechanism of life extension will be lost between generations," said Greer seeprti quoted from ScienceNews.com, Tuesday (10/25/2011).

But it turned out to live longer can be inherited for at least three generations of offspring although worms are no longer experiencing changes in DNA that lead to the extension of life span.

The mechanism of extending long life ended suddenly in between the third and fourth generation. The reason is unknown, but Brunet speculate that each generation gradually build back some of the proteins so that the mechanism of extension of life broken.

No one knows whether the findings on cacaing bracelet that would apply also to other animals or humans, but the process of aging which are found in worms are also found in other organisms, including humans.

"Mutations in the genome that allows people to live longer, but surely there are epigenetic factors are also involved," said Brian Kennedy, CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Navato, California.