Genetics of Aging in Humans and Flies

In spite of the lack of focus placed on the subject by the "research funding powers that be", insights into the genetics of aging keep rolling out, month by month and year by year.

Some recent research discusses specific alleles that seem correlated with survival to age 90:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200512/s1537519.htm

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-12/g-nre121205.php

In a similar vein I just read biologist Michael Rose's very excellent book The Long Tomorrow

http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LifeSciences/EvolutionaryBiology/?view=usa&ci=0195179390

which recounts his work studying aging in flies. One of his more striking results is that after a certain age is reached, the mortality rate in flies stops increasing and stays constant. (The book is easy to read by anyone who understands high school biology, yet presents and describes important research without significant dumbing-down. It also does a pretty good job of getting across the flavor of modern experimental biology research ... and of emphasizing the point that a lot more progress toward curing aging could be made if society chose to devote resources toward this goal. Many very good scientists, such as Rose himself and Aubrey de Grey and many others, have promising ideas regarding how to better understand and potentially alleviate the aging process, but our society is more interested in spending money blowing people up and inventing new forms of fabric softener. Bummer, huh.)

Also, in reviewing the work of some other researchers, Rose notes that there seem to be 300-400 genes that behave differentially in old versus young flies. He disputes the ideas of some other researchers who claim that there may just be 1 or 2 genes serving as master control genes for the aging process. I tend to agree with him, yet, I wonder if a careful analysis of gene expression data from old and young flies might indicate that a few dozen of these 300-400 genes are more "central" and in a sense drive the behavior of the other differentially-behaving genes. This is something I'd be interested to work on myself if I could find some good data freely available. To oversimplify slightly, it's something that could be addressed by simply plugging some relevant microarray data into our Biomind software.

The data used in this paper

http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=419663

would seem to be adequate for this kind of study, but, I have not found the raw data available online. I'm going to see if this research group is interested in collaboration.

On the theme of foolish allocation of resources, my contacts at the Center for Disease Control suggest to me that the budget cuts hinted at in

http://www.usmedicine.com/article.cfm?articleID=1046&issueID=72

are likely actually going to happen. Bush seems to be cutting the CDC's budget by 7% or so (to fund his war in Iraq and his differential tax cuts for the wealthy, I suppose). Of course, this doesn't directly affect aging research because in its immense foolishness the government does not consider aging a disease. But it affects aging research indirectly because there are commonalities between aging and other diseases. Fortunately, real scientific progress continues in spite of this sort of idiocy.