The foutain of youth?

[Keith Robison]

french at RUST.ZSO.DEC.COM writes:


>To preserve the age of a multi-celled organism, the differentiated
>state (methylation pattern) of the DNA in each cell must be preserved.
>Thus it would be necessary to generate duplicate copies of each cell's
>chromosomes (preserving the DNA from a single body part would not work).


Fatal flaw:  Most metazoans (multi-cellular animals) do not methylate
their DNA to a detectable extent.  A particular example is Drosophila,
which clearly ages.  Methylation in metazoans largely appears to be
a mammalian anomaly.

People are looking for ageing genes in Drosophila -- there was a blurb
on it in a recent Science (the one before the format change).




Keith Robison
Harvard University
Program in Biochemistry, Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

robison at ribo.harvard.edu