I’m going through a bunch of comparative transcriptomics & genomics papers purporting to find genes associated with aging by looking at either which genes are overexpressed in young vs old animals, or highly mutated between long-lived vs short-lived species.
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There’s almost no intersection between papers so far — even the ones that refer to the same tissue type in the same species. Am I missing something, or is this fairly damning to the hypothesis “correlational signatures of aging & longevity make good drug targets”?
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By contrast, we do know a cluster of genes which, when knocked out, reliably extend life & prevent some age-related dysfunctions in multiple model organisms, namely the insulin/IGF/GH pathway.
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Of course, it would be prohibitively expensive to knock out every possible gene in a mouse and see if it lives longer. So we understandably don’t have many of these examples validated for lifespan in mammals. (There are more examples of “knockout rescues disease model.”)
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Replying to @AdamMarblestone
A mouse lifespan study with 100 mice is about $200k, $400k with thermoneutral housing. This doesn’t count the cost of genetic modification.
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How much of that is salary and could be reduced by offshoring?
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