Body Clock Provides Clues to Aging
October 23, 2013
A group of elderly men take a rest on their wheelchairs at a park in Beijing, (File photo).
If you’re searching for the fountain of youth, you might find it in your DNA. That’s according to a new study that sheds light on the biological clock ticking in our genomes, why our bodies age and how we can slow down the process.
University of California genetics professor Steve Horvath has created a new tool that can accurately measure the aging body.
A newly discovered biological clock goes beyond Leonardo de Vinci’s image of the ideal man to add time and measures the age of most human tissues, organs and cells throughout the body. (Credit: UCLA/Horvath Lab)
“Basically I developed a way of predicting age based on DNA," Horvath said. "To achieve this goal I identified 353 markers on the DNA which measure DNA methylation levels.”
Methylation is a naturally occurring epigenetic - or gene altering - process that chemically modifies the DNA and is critical in the development of every organism. Horvath and his colleagues gleaned information from 8,000 samples to chart methylation in healthy and diseased organs, tissues and cells, from fetuses to centenarians.
“For one thing, I find that this epigenetic clock ticks fastest during development, and after age 20 it slows down to a constant ticking rate," he said. "But also I find that cancer tissue is on average 36 years older than healthy tissue and I observed that effect in all 20 cancer types that I studied.”
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