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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Replying to @s_r_constantin @AdamMarblestone
why $200K? Our housing cost is about $0.1/mouse/day in shared cages, so (rounding up) about $5K/yr for 100 mice. So if a mouse lives 4 yrs then that's $20K for 100 mice.
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knocking out 20K genes 1 at a time would still be a lot: $400M. And would likely not reveal much because of gene interactions and dosage effects.
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Then you have better prices than I’m used to! $1/mouse/day is what I typically see. Where is “we”?
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