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Flatworms Defy Aging Through Cell Division Tricks
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from The University of Nottingham have demonstrated how a species of flatworm overcomes the aging process to be potentially immortal. The discovery, published (abstract; full text PDF) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is part of a project funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and Medical Research Council and may shed light on the possibilities of alleviating aging and age-related characteristics in human cells."
After finding the gene for telomerase synthesis in the worms, the researchers were able to observe that the worms "...dramatically increase the activity of this gene when they regenerate, allowing stem cells to maintain their telomeres as they divide to replace missing tissues."
I wonder what they sacrifice for this? I'm guessing they are highly prone to cancer or something. I'm nature I doubt they live long enough for problems like that to manifest.
A flatworm only has, maybe, a few hundred brain cells, but if they get regenerated are they a "copy", or just "new"?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I find it disturbing that my tapeworms will outlive me.
Better known as 318230.
They have regeneration down, now all they need is time travel.
Here is a video from the researchers themselves.
http://www.test-tube.org.uk/videos/pages_aziz_immortal_worms.htm
The T-Virus... is protean, changing from liquid to airborne to blood transmission, depending on its environment. It is almost impossible to kill. -- Red Queen
Pretty close
Jurkat cells are an immortalized line of T lymphocyte cells that are used to study a...
Jurkat J6 cells have been found to produce a xenotropic murine leukemia virus (X-MLV) that could potentially affect experimental outcomes and infect lab technicians. This infection may also change the virulence and tropism of the virus by way of phenotypic mixing and/or recombination.
So, only the transmission step to be solved.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
So if they have to cut each others heads off because in the end the can only be one.I am IMMORTAL!!!!!!
"I doubt they live long enough for problems like that to manifest."
If you train a flatworm to pass a labyrinth and then cut the flatworm into pieces, each piece will remember the labyrinth!
So, with this memory they don't need to live much longer, piecewise.
They have all the nice tricks up their sleeves. The trade-off may be their looks.
I, for one, welcome our new flatworm genes carrying overlords.
New Summer Blockbuster!
Tapeworm genes turn the billionaire playboys and super models into immortals, only to be taken down by the Cancer!
Telomerase for all.
They've found the Flatworm of Youth!
for ( i = 1; welcome( our ); ) new Imortal::FlatwormOverlords;
From the Discussion section of the linked paper:
We find that in the model species S. mediterranea, asexual animals demonstrate the potential to maintain telomere length during regeneration. Sexual animals appear to only lengthen their telomeres through the sexual reproduction process. This finding suggests that asexual individuals will be able to avoid senescence over evolutionary timescales using telomerase, a prerequisite for the formation of an evolutionarily stable fissionating asexual lineage. [. . .] The difference we observe between asexual and sexual animals is surprising, given that sexual animals also appear to have an indefinite regenerative capacity. We conclude that either they would eventually show effects of telomere shortening or that they are able to use another chromosome end-maintenance mechanism not involving telomerase. [emphasis added.]
So both sexual and asexual animals seem to have an indefinite regenerative capacity, but sexual animals appear not to lengthen their telomeres except through the sexual reproduction process. So how do the sexual animals attain their indefinite regenerative capacity, and why does the mechanism seem to be different from that of the asexual animals? I guess the next experiment is to start slicing up sexual animals.
What, still no references to the film "In Time"?
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Timelords are Flatworms?
Now when this will be made available to humans the whole game will change again: Basically the corporate overlords will live forever and they will only have to change the workers generation by generation. This until they will create enough robots to do the job instead of the workers. Then most of the humanity will be kinda obsolete. They will live in closed premises, served by robots, having fun among them. the rest of us will freely participate in madmax
Isn't cancer's trick also to synthesize telomarase?
The Immortal Life Cycle of Turritopsis, with diagrams http://9e.devbio.com/preview_article.php?ch=2&id=6 __ Inmmortal human cells. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Henrietta-Lacks-Immortal-Cells.html
It isn't clear at this point if the telomere hypothesis works at a cross-species level. In some species, telomere length is apparently not correlated with aging. In particular, there are some birds which have short telomeres but long lifespans. There's a very good book aimed at laypeople on the science of understanding of aging and the history of attempts- "The Youth Pill" by David Stipp. The only minor disclaimer is that the field is changing so fast that the book is already slightly out of date. But it contains a lot of interesting tidbits and a fair bit of neat history as well. I strongly recommend it.
Have gnu, will travel.
I wonder if there could be some advantages to mortality. It just seems it would be easier (take less energy) to keep an existing organism in good repair indefinitely, compared to starting over with a new generation. If so, then lifespans evolved to be deliberately shorter than need be. If a tree can live 5000 years, why not an animal?
Shorter generations allow faster adaptation and evolution. Maybe immortality makes organisms so risk adverse that it becomes detrimental to the survival of the species. More adventurous creatures have more successes, even if half of them die of bad luck. New generations more readily learn new ideas, more easily abandon or never learn old ideas that no longer work. Or perhaps the demands and rigors of living set the odds of living more than a few decades so low that investing in repairs isn't worthwhile.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I wish I had known this years ago when we were writing and printing The Evil Platy-hell-minthes, Planaria of Destruction comics. Then more megalomanicial rants about the benefits of immortality could have been included and they would have had a good grounding in biology instead of Pullingitoutofmyassology.
The planarian has come up several time here on /. and I thought that some people might like a quick intro these guys.
The flatworm used in this study is the planarian S. mediterranea, a free living (i.e. non-parasitic) flatworm. They have a distinct head and tail. They have non-lensed eyes capable of detecting the direction and strength of light allowing them to move away from it. Finally, they have a bi-lobed cephalic ganglia (rudimentary brain) and a rudimentary CNS. A similar species of planarians (dorotocephala) is frequently seen in high school science class.
There are 2 varieties of this species - one reproduces asexually while the other reproduces sexually. Both varieties are capable of complete regeneration (i.e. a full worm from almost any fragment) when cut. In both cases, the only dividing cells in the worms are stem cells called neoblasts.
Fun Fact: Thomas Hunt Morgan did many of the initial experiments on planarians.
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Standard disclaimer: I work in a lab that uses these animal.
...the benefit of mortality is that bad people always die. No matter how much power one sociopath picks up, we only have to tolerate them for a century. Let's not ruin a good thing by "fixing" that.