Young Plasma from Pigs Reduces Epigenetic Age in Old Rats

One interesting question in the development of new epigenetic clocks to measure biological age, particularly now that a large consortium of researchers has published a universal mammalian clock, is how one demonstrates that a new clock is in some way useful enough or interesting enough to spend time on. There are, after all, many published clocks at this point, and we might expect that the research community will attempt to standardize on the new universal clock. Why use another novel clock? One answer might be that the clock is optimized to give a large signal under a particular set of circumstances. Hence we arrive at studies like the one noted here, in which researchers demonstrate that their novel clock performs in a potentially useful way when assessing the results of plasma transfer from young individuals to old individuals between mammalian species. Young blood plasma is known to confer beneficial effects on various organs in mice and rats. However, it was not known whether plasma from young pigs rejuvenates old rat tissues at the epigenetic level; whether it alters the epigenetic clock, which is a highly accurate molecular biomarker of aging. To address this question, we developed and validated six different epigenetic clocks for rat tissues that are based on DNA methylation values derived from n=613 tissue samples. As indicated by their respective names, the rat pan-tissue clock can be applied to DNA methylation profiles from all rat tissues, while the rat b...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs