Word: length
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...better understand the aging discrepancy, a team of researchers in Britain and the Netherlands scanned more than 500,000 genetic variations across the human genome. Using a population of nearly 12,000, they then attempted to pinpoint a genetic link to telomere length. (See how to prevent illness...
...significant breakthrough, the team successfully identified that a particular gene sequence was associated with differences in telomere length between individuals. What's more, the sequence was clustered near a gene called TERC, which is already known to play a role in the production of an enzyme called telomerase. Telomerase repairs telomeres when they shorten. "That was very exciting for us," says Nilesh Samani, a cardiologist at the University of Leicester who co-led the research, which was published last week in Nature Genetics. "It gave us great confidence that we identified genetic variants on a pathway we already know...
TERC is likely only one of several genes that influence telomere length, says Tim Spector of Kings College London, who co-led the study. "Our next step will be to use whole genome sequencing to expand our search from 500,000 to 50 million [genetic] markers. TERC is almost certainly only the first piece of the genetic puzzle," he says...
Spector and Samani say that understanding the components that determine telomere length may one day help researchers devise new treatments for age-related diseases, particularly heart disease (the study was partially funded by the British Heart Foundation). "I see in my practice 80-year-olds with healthy coronary arteries and 40-year-olds with heart disease. We may be on our way to explaining the genetic component in the explanation for why this is so, and so expanding our knowledge of the disease and how to treat it," Samani says. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
...that end, Shapiro talks with her old family rabbi, meditates, practices yoga and produces a memoir preciously divided into 102 tiny chapters loaded with mantras, definitions and people chatting over cups of herbal tea. The sense is of an essay padded to book length, but some of these miniatures work. A charmingly self-aware one describes the family car being struck by a bottle of salad dressing. Shapiro is taken aback; she had not put salad dressing on her list of fears...