While the Fountain of Youth and the Philosopher's Stone might be fictional ways of achieving mortality that our ancestors dreamed of as cold comforts, attempting to prolong the longevity of life might be a little bit closer to reality than we thought — at least in a type of worm, that is. According to a paper published in the journal eLife Sciences, researchers have found a way to extend the lifespan of roundworms with the help of anti-depressants.
A collaboration between scientists at the Scripps Research Institute, the University of Cologne in Germany and the Indiana University School of Medicine, the scientists used the Caenorhabditis elegans as their test subject due to its relatively short lifespan — about three weeks — and its ability to produce offspring quickly, within a few mere days of the first generation hatching themselves. The species was also picked based on another study conducted in 2007, in which introducing mianserin (a compound also found in anti-depressants) into their systems elongated the lives of the roundworm test samples by 30 to 40 percent.
In the 2015 study, the scientists noted that when they gave the sample worms, which were divided into three groups and numbered in the thousands, the same compound, they experienced a "transcriptional drift," or "a phenomenon that describes how aging causes genes within functional groups to change expression in opposing directions." In layman's terms, a "transcriptional drift" is when an inactive gene is suddenly switched "on" like a light, and in this case, the gene that did so caused serotonergic signals to curb physiological degeneration.
However, the scientists are still unsure as to whether this transcriptional drift is permanent, or if these "on" and "off" modes oscillate. As the published report read, "whether longevity mechanisms counteract the effects of aging continually throughout life, or whether they act during specific periods of life, preventing changes that precede mortality is unclear." Either way, the scientific team did what eons of evolution could not.
Via: Popular Science
