Fight Aging! Newsletter, January 7th 2019

This study suggests that advantages and disadvantages vary by environment and diet, however, which might explain why evolution has selected for multiple haplogroups rather than one dominant haplogroup. This is all interesting, but none of it stops the research community from engineering a globally better-than-natural human mitochondrial genome, and then copying it into the cell nucleus as a backup to prevent the well-known contribution of mitochondrial DNA damage to aging. Further, nothing stops us from keeping the haplogroups we have and rendering the effects of variants small and irrelevant through the development of other forms of enhancement biotechnology. The natural world handed over to us after billions of years of evolution is a starting point, not the bounds of the possible. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and the dietary macronutrient ratio are known to influence a wide range of phenotypic traits including longevity, fitness and energy production. Commonly mtDNA mutations are posited to be selectively neutral or reduce fitness and, to date, no selectively advantageous mtDNA mutations have been experimentally demonstrated in adult female Drosophila. Here we propose that a ND V161L mutation interacted with diets differing in their macronutrient ratios to influence organismal physiology and mitochondrial traits, but further studies are required to definitively show no linked mtDNA mutations are functionally significant. We utilized two mtDNA types (mit...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs