IMMORTALITY RESEARCH

Researchers at the University of California Berkeley have captured the most

detailed images to date of telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens the ends of
chromosomes and plays a critical role in aging.

These images provide long-sought after insight into how telomerase works,
and will help guide the design of drugs that target the enzyme, which could
have some interesting implications for cancer and aging.

Telomeres and the Aging Process

Your genome consists of more than 3 billion base pairs of DNA, which is a lot
to squeeze into the nucleus of a cell, but the cell accomplishes this by winding
up the DNA and compressing it into chromosomes. Most cells in the human
body contain 22 pairs of chromosomes plus a pair of sex chromosomes.

To help protect the integrity of the chromosome, and to prevent the end of one
chromosome from fusing into the next one, each chromosome is capped with a
telomere, which is a series of repeated nucleotide sequences. In humans, this
repeated sequence is TTAGGG. The average human telomere has thousands of
these.

Every time a cell divides, the chromosomes are copied, but they aren’t copied
all the way to the end. Consequently, telomeres gradually get shorter. In fact,
we lose around 50 to 200 base pairs each time. In this way, they behave like a
cellular countdown clock.

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As telomere length falls below a certain threshold – somewhere just shy of

4000 base pairs – you start getting problems, like a rise in pro-inflammatory
signals and increased risk of cancer. Indeed, short telomeres are known to be
involved in a number of diseases, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease,
and certain cancers.

Eventually, cells stop replicating and enter a state called

‘senescence’. Evidence suggests that accumulation of these senescent cells is
what causes organ and tissue decline associated with aging.