In a five-year grant renewal, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $18.5 million to a multi-institutional team that includes Benjamin Garcia, the Raymond H. Wittcoff Distinguished Professor and head of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at WashU Medicine, to support the development of new methods of detecting genetic elements that promote the health span of long-living mammals like humans. Garcia and collaborators at the University of Rochester and elsewhere aim to determine what genes and proteins control the molecular pathways that are most important for longevity and discover anti-aging interventions that may help prevent illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease.
DNA degrades over time, which can lead to detrimental health effects as organisms age. One of these effects is Alzheimer's disease, which impacts an estimated 7 million people across the U.S. Organisms with long lifespans have been found to use their epigenome - protein and nucleic acid modifications to their DNA - to protect their genome from degradation and the associated negative effects.
Garcia and team have already determined some of the key genes that contribute to longevity in mammals and their associated molecular mechanisms - including the discovery of the importance of DNA repair in the longest-lived mammal, the bowhead whale, which can survive more than 100 years. Understanding how these pathways are regulated to best protect DNA from degrading with age may provide potential targets for therapies that could delay the onset of illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease.
