Sea Urchins as a Model of Negligible Senescence

Species that exhibit negligible senescence tend to be long-lived, but more interestingly appear to exhibit few to none of the functional declines of degenerative aging until very late in life, quite unlike the situation for most mammals, and particularly for humans. One can argue that the most useful species that exhibit negligible senescence are those with near relative species that age more normally. The closer the relative, the more likely it is that comparing the biochemistry of the two will lead to new knowledge regarding aging. So naked mole rats versus other, less long-lived mole rats, Brandt's bat versus other shorter-lived small bats, or as in today's open access paper, the red sea urchin versus short-lived urchin species. Whether this work on the comparative biology of aging can cost-effectively produce a basis for useful therapies in human medicine remains an open question. Research into the biochemistry of naked mole rats, probably the closest negligibly senescent species to our own species, has yet to yield a way to build useful treatments for aspects of human aging. The one experiment conducted to date involving the transfer of naked mole-rat genes into mice didn't produce the hoped-for sizable gains. It may turn out to be slow, expensive, and challenging to work towards this sort of modification of our biochemistry, as compared with the more standard approaches to medical research Genomic signatures of exceptional longevity and negligible aging in...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs