Watch in DNA

2013/11/08 Etxebeste Aduriz, Egoitz - Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Biologia
• Biokimika

Age leaves a wide variety of cracks in the body, but researchers at the University of California have shown that what leaves in DNA can be a great clock to measure aging of tissues and organs. As age advances, the degree of methylation of DNA changes, and that is where researchers have been based to predict the age of tissues.

Methyl are like switches: turn off genes. And to see how the degree of methylation changes throughout life, more than 8,000 healthy samples of 51 types of tissues and strains and 6,000 cancers have been analyzed. And they have focused on 353 markers. In some markers, methylation increases as it ages and in others it descends. For this reason, they have achieved a watch that announces with great precision the age of healthy tissues. This watch provides values close to zero in newborn samples and negative values in prenatal samples and induced pluripotent cells.

On the other hand, they have observed that women's breasts are two or three years older than the rest of tissues of the same body, depending on the methylation clock. In the case of women with breast cancer, posttumor healthy tissue is 12 years older than the rest of the body's tissues. And they have also seen that the tissues of 20 types of cancer are 36 years older than healthy tissues. The work has been published in the journal Genome Biology.