Our genes of metabolism interact in a very complex and dynamic fashion, and some aspects of that interaction determine longevity. Efforts to pick apart this tangled web require equally complex tools of analysis: "The genome era and the advent of high-throughput technologies have brought about a huge increase in the amount of data available to biologists: each genome contains tens of thousands of genes, whose products can potentially interact with each other in an astronomical number of ways. This quantitative change has created a need for a qualitative change in the way we perform analyses: the human brain is not very good at understanding thousands of things at once, let alone millions or billions, so we must find new ways to extract comprehensible patterns from torrents of data. Many of the techniques being developed to analyze large biological networks fall under the umbrella of systems biology. Some of the newest tools have been used guide genetic perturbation studies in yeast, resulting in the discovery of novel lifespan control genes. What can such network analysis tell us about human aging?" The enormous complexity of metabolism-determined longevity is yet another argument for focusing on repair of already identified damage to reverse aging, rather than trying to manipulate this tangled system to slow aging.

Link: http://ouroboros.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/interactions-between-lifespan-control-genes-form-a-longevity-network/