Aging is a process all of us have to go through until our deaths. But can we slow it down? Scientists were able to prove that we can slow down aging, at least in these worms. By tweaking a couple of cellular pathways, they have extended the lifespan of these worms by a staggering 500 percent.
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C. elegans is a humble little worm that often finds itself at the heart of aging studies. That’s because it shares many cellular pathways with humans, and it typically lives for three or four weeks, meaning any changes to that lifespan are quickly apparent and easy to measure.
In plenty of past studies, scientists have managed to use drugs or genetic engineering to increase the lifespan of C. elegans by 50 or 100 percent. If directly applied to the average human lifespan of about 80 years, that would be like living to between 120 and 160 years. But in the new study, the team unexpectedly made the worms live five times longer than usual – the human equivalent of which would be 400 years.
This is not a guarantee that this will translate to humans. However, it should be able to give scientists “a new avenue to explore in developing anti-aging techniques.”
More details about this over at New Atlas.
(Image Credit: Bob Goldstein, UNC Chapel Hill/CC BY SA 3.0)
Source: neatorama