Eating less alters cellular aging related gene expression

Science Mission

The ageing process encompasses progressive dysfunction in almost every organ in almost every organism, forming an immense challenge to modern medicine that seems to require many parallel interventions addressing an increasingly complex series of age-related conditions. A set of ‘Hallmarks of ageing’ have been defined, providing a framework for understanding ageing pathologies at the cellular and organismal level, but how these hallmarks arise and how cells respond to them often remains unclear (Lopez-Otin et al. 2013). Given the complexity of the process, it is not too surprising that an array of studies of the ageing transcriptome have been undertaken over the past two decades attempting to shed light on the underlying drivers of pathology. These studies have spanned organisms from yeast to man, taking advantage of the remarkable conservation of ageing pathology across eukaryotes to examine the ageing process in experimentally tractable model organisms. However, major challenges have been encountered in the performance of reproducible experiments and the extraction of meaningful data; early studies, particularly in higher eukaryotes, found few changes in common, and it is only with more recent meta-analyses of giant cross-sectional datasets that a consensus is starting to emerge on a set of gene expression changes that are associated with ageing. Here we survey the literature of transcriptomic changes associated with normal ageing across evolutionarily diverse eukaryotes and describe a set of potential gene expression hallmarks indicative of underlying age-linked gene expression programmes.

A new study provides the most detailed report to date of the cellular effects of a calorie-restricted diet in rats. While the benefits of caloric restriction have long been known, the new results show how this restriction can protect against ageing in cellular pathways.

If you want to reduce levels of inflammation throughout your body, delay the onset of age-related diseases, and live longer--eat less food. That's the conclusion of a new study by scientists that provides the most detailed report to date of the cellular effects of a calorie-restricted diet in rats. While the benefits of caloric restriction have long been known, the new results show how this restriction can protect against ageing in cellular pathways, as detailed in the journal Cell.

"We already knew that calorie restriction increases life span, but now we've shown all the changes that occur at a single-cell level to cause that," says the senior author of the new paper. "This gives us targets that we may eventually be able to act on with drugs to treat ageing in humans."