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DEFENSES. “Species that are well protected from predators – for example, those that have a shell, can fly, or are poisonous – tend to live longer than related, less well-protected species.” http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-evolution-of-aging-23651151 View in LinkedIn

THE BALANCE. “The evolution of lifespan can be viewed as a balance between selection for increased reproductive success and the factors that increase the intrinsic age-dependent components of mortality.” http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-evolution-of-aging-23651151 View in LinkedIn

THE EQUATION. “These lifespan promoting effects of selection are balanced by those that tend to increase adult mortality relative to juvenile mortality. Consequently, if extrinsic, environmentally imposed adult mortality is high, selection becomes weak, thereby allowing the evolution of higher levels of intrinsic mortality (i.e., aging).” http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-evolution-of-aging-23651151 View in LinkedIn

REPLICOMETER. “Telomeric shortening appears to be the replicometer that determines the number of times that a normal cell is able to divide. Once a threshold number of telomeric (TTAGGG) repeats is reached, downstream events presumably are triggered that signal the cessation of DNA replication. Wright and Shay have offered an alternative explanation of how telomere shortening acts as a replicometer.” https://lnkd.in/esfPTAR View in LinkedIn

LIFESPAN AND BREEDING. “A longer lifespan normally implies increased reproductive success, and factors such as low adult mortality (permitting more reproductive events per lifetime), high juvenile mortality (making it necessary for adults to reproductively compensate for such loss), and high variation in juvenile mortality from one bout of reproduction to the next (increasing uncertainty in reproductive success and requiring reproductive compensation as well) therefore all tend to lengthen reproductive lifespan.” http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-evolution-of-aging-23651151 View in LinkedIn

REPLICOMETER. “The sought-after mechanism should not be called a clock or chronometer because these are devices used for the measurement of the passage of time. Because the replicative limit of normal cells is not directly the result of the passage of time but the number of DNA replications, the putative mechanism should be more properly referred to as an event counter.” http://protein.bio.msu.ru/biokhimiya/contents/v62/full/62111380.html View in LinkedIn

THE CELLULAR COUNTER for age, "the holy grail in cytogerentology. Because cell mortality and immortality are inextricably linked to aging and cancer, the importance of this goal would be difficult to exaggerate.” http://protein.bio.msu.ru/biokhimiya/contents/v62/full/62111380.html View in LinkedIn

IMPERCEPTIBLE AGING. “Animals that do not reach a fixed size in adulthood either do not age or the rate is undetectable. Fascinating recent findings reveal that in the rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss), an animal with imperceptible age changes, and unlike animals that do age, high telomerase activity has been found in the cells of all of the organs analysed.” https://lnkd.in/esfPTAR View in LinkedIn

APPLICATIONS. “This discovery has profound theoretical and practical implications that include the immortalization of highly differentiated normal human cell types for the production of medically useful proteins.” https://lnkd.in/esfPTAR View in LinkedIn

ENGINEERING IMMORTALITY. “In 1998 it was reported that normal, mortal, human cell strains could be immortalized with apparent retention of their normal properties by transfecting them with vectors encoding the human telomerase catalytic subunit. Thus, the replicometer can be purposefully circumvented. This has provided direct evidence proving the role of telomere shortening in cell senescence and telomerase expression in cell immortality.” https://lnkd.in/esfPTAR View in LinkedIn