io9
It's been known for a while that restricting your diet will increase your lifespan, but now researchers have shown one reason why: Eating less causes your ribosomes (your cells' protein factories) to mutate. And it's looking like mutated ribosomes (pictured here) could be one key to life extension. The good news is that you may not have to starve yourself to mutate your ribosomes anymore. Biologists at the University of Washington have managed to induce the life-extending mutation in ribosomes with a drug that doubles the lifespan of yeast cells.
The key is to lower protein-production in cells, which is why eating less can cause lifespan extension. According to the University of Washington:
In this project, the UW researchers studied many different strains of yeast cells that had lower protein production. They found that mutations to the ribosome, the cell's protein factory, sometimes led to increased life span. Ribosomes are made up of two parts — the large and small subunits — and the researchers tried to isolate the life-span-related mutation to one of those parts.The study will be published tomorrow in the journal Cell. Image via NSF."What we noticed right away was that the long-lived strains always had mutations in the large ribosomal subunit and never in the small subunit," said the study's lead author, Kristan Steffen, a graduate student in the UW Department of Biochemistry.
The researchers also tested a drug called diazaborine, which specifically interferes with synthesis of the ribosomes' large subunits, but not small subunits, and found that treating cells with the drug made them live about 50 percent longer than untreated cells. Using a series of genetic tests, the scientists then showed that depletion of the ribosomes' large subunits was likely to be increasing life span by a mechanism related to dietary restriction — the TOR signaling pathway.
Researchers Uncover Details About How Dietary Restriction Slows Down Aging [Eurekalert]
Comments
Sign me up! Twenty-second century, here I come.
I knew that drugs would be the answer. Always with the drugs...
So now I can eat like a pig and live twice as long. Science is like a twisted Fairy Godmother.
@BullfightsOnAcid:
Alas, if only Orson Wells had lived long enough to see this vision. He could have been eating Rosebud frozen peas well into this century.
@Miranda Kali: That deserves a drunk Orson Welles hocking Paul Masson posting:
+ Watch video
As far as I'm concerned, Yeast secured his immortality long ago with "The Second Coming." C'mon, people: Get educated.
Unless I die tomorrow, I don't want my life to be twice as long as it's going to be. Really, who needs to live to be 50 anyway? Once I start losing control of my bowel movements again, I want to be dead.
@moff: Oh that was Yeast? I thought it was E. Coli all this time!
@male roof blower (CFB):
Why is this always everyones assumption about living longer. In case noone has noticed, people who live longer often seem younger than others as well. Its not that they are living longer, its that they are aging more slowly.
@male roof blower (CFB): really? 50 is your limit? aiming kinda low, aren't ya?
The way I figure, if you can manage to live long enough, medical technology will get to the where they can practically give you a shiny, new body.
I'm willing to brave the ravages of old age for that possibility.
@male roof blower (CFB): See, real men get around that by just wearing a toilet. See, bowel problems solved!
@Annalee Newitz: You mean e.e. coli?
That graphic looks kind of like a dessert. I want my mutated ribosomes with chocolate sauce and pineapple chunks.
@moff:
Oooo. That wiley e. coli!
@male roof blower (CFB): agreed. I'm sure I'll live long enough. Old people is a problem our planet is fighting hard enough; no need to make it harder. jk
@theOmegaMan: While I would like to believe that, that isn't always the case. I see plenty of old people who look younger but health wise, they are there age or worse.
@Miranda Kali: The way I see it, I feel like I've lived a LOOONG time now and I'm not 30 yet. But the time I get to 60, I'm pretty sure I'll be ready to go.
I don't know about you guys but life doesn't have that many mysteries left for me to discover OR that will be discovered in my lifetime. Why wait around waiting for something to happen? Sounds like a mental version of a high school Friday night.
Fucking a I want that shot now, also when I get old I want to find that one guy who is going to be paying my Medicare so I can bother him about working harder.
@jp182: Really? Did you count all the mysteries that aren't left to be discovered?
People, it's not the years, it's the mileage.
[shoeblogs.com]
[www.arthurdevany.com]
Just take care of yourself.
Also, you don't have to starve yourself to gain this benefit. You can do this today by fasting for 2 days once or twice a month.
Well, since I turned 49, 50 doesn't seem so great as a life expectancy, there boyo.
You may disagree, but you'll probably spell it wrong or use the wrong verb tense anyway, so who can be certain what you think?
You need us old farts just to write your comic books for you.
Doncha know?
@moff: Yeah he did... there are only three things left...
Grand Unification.
Faster than Light travel.
If there is anything else left.
Once we cover those three we are done...
wait the answer to #3 has been uncovered.. it is "Yes, lots."
Seriously, this is pretty cool...
If one could do this it might be like lenghtening your telomeres without the cancer risks...
And for you party poopers worried about loosing control of your bowels unless you already have problems (*stares*), the studies that have shown the lengthening effects of restricted caloric intake have show that it is like being physically 40 when you are 75 (or whatever ages you want)
@DocGratis: Hey, don't forget:
Why do we park on driveway and drive on a parkway?
and
Ladies! Why are they always crying about something?
@moff: Also: the deal with the airplane peanuts.
@DorothyMantooth: Wait. What are you doing here? YOU NERD.
@moff: You know, the usual. Stalking you... Inciting stuff...
@DorothyMantooth: You're not going to ask me to return those underwear I took, I hope.
@moff: Of course not, silly! I left them out special for you!
Were they actually mutating, or were they just changing structure?
You know, with overpopulation and increasing food scarcity due to increased food prices (related to ethanol production and peak oil) and global warming etc... we'll all be on calorie restrictive diets pretty soon enough, drug or no drug. Long live famine!
I really don't want to live twice as long... It isn't the old-and-sickly so much as the way that kids these days think so many things that infuriate me.
I'd like to see the future, but I'm pretty sure if I live long enough, I'll be nothing but a crabby, strident (okay, okay. crabbier and more strident) kernel of condensed hate.
Then there's the whole doubled-lifespan = doubled rate of population growth thing...
Somebody else can have my portion of extended lifespan - Miranda Kali, I think you called dibs.
-Kle.
Seeing as your weight bearing joints can barely make it 50 years without wearing out I'd hate to see what it's going to take to keep a 160 year old mobile.
@Final: We're working on cybernetics for a very good reason.
The deal will be, you can live twice as long but you're limited to being biological parent to at most 1 child.
Those that don't take the deal can have up to 3 children. And if you have already had more than 2 children, too late to take the deal.
Oh, and you have to be fucking rich to buy into the deal. So nyah.
I'm thinking that it would be nice to leave yeast in the frig and have it last twice as long. You never know when you're gonna want to bake a loaf of bread.
I'd like to live longer, but I do not want to look like I'm 150.
This caloric restriction thing is bullshit. Sure, it's been demonstrated in animals: animals who live in a sterile lab, where the unrestricted condition is equivalent to a human eating an unlimited butter pie diet. It's not exactly a huge surprise that restricting their intake makes them live longer!
The evidence from humans has yet to come in, but one thing we can say is that caloric restriction makes you too pathetic to do anything, and screws over your immune system. Well done, guys!
@twic: Where exactly did you read this?
Everything I have sene says that the control animals were allowed to eat until satiety... But seeing as animals generally do not gorge themselves that is not saying "unlimited butter pie".. and also all the works that covered it demonstrated that the control animals live what is considered relatively normal lifespans for the animals in question...
@twic: "Too pathetic to do anything" . . . yeah, I think a lot more things besides caloric restriction do that to you.
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