More Fuel For the DNA Damage Debate

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Does the level of random damage to your nuclear DNA - genomic instability - have anything to do with general manifestations of aging? We know the correlation with cancer, but beyond that it's up for debate. This open access paper provides a new line of evidence: "Increasing genomic instability is associated with aging in eukaryotes, but the connection between genomic instability and natural variation in life span is unknown. We have quantified chronological life span and [genomic instability] in [yeast]. We show that genomic instability increases [during] chronological aging. The age-dependent increase of genomic instability generally lags behind the drop of viability and this delay accounts for ~50% of the observed natural variation of replicative life span in these yeast isolates. We conclude that the abilities of yeast strains to tolerate genomic instability co-vary with their replicative life spans. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first quantitative evidence that demonstrates a link between genomic instability and natural variation in life span."

Link: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=2441830