Worms May Hold The Key To Living Longer!
The longevity finding that came from a C. elegans aging study.
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Yep, you read that right. Worms… yes, worms may hold the key to extending the lifespan of humans! 😎
That’s. So. Crazy. #mindblown
I’m talking about a specific species of worms — the Caenorhabditis elegans a.k.a. C. elegans, our little buddy in the picture a couple of sentences up. ⬆️
Recently, this worm was used in an aging study by researchers at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory that was able to increase its lifespan by 500%!
Before I dive into this experiment, I’ll give a brief background into a field known as Longevity and why we might want to extend the lifespan of humans.
What if we could live forever? 💭
I think many of us have asked ourselves this question at least once, or something along the lines of what if we could live longer than humans usually do?
Well it turns out a lot of people would love to live longer and with a field called Longevity, this may become a reality in our lifetime.
Longevity is the study of extending one’s life expectancy.
There are lots of different research techniques and technologies being explored from senescent cells to free radicals to genetic engineering, which is the topic we’re going to focus on today.
The book of life a.k.a. the genome. 🔬
Every organism has a genome. It’s stored in their cell’s nucleus and in different organisms a couple of other areas.
The genome is a complete copy of an organism’s Deoxyribonucleic acid a.k.a. DNA. A molecule arranged in two strands that coil together in a ladder-like form known as a double helix. (Check out my article on genomes, to learn more 😉).
This DNA can be thought of as the code of life and it’s made up of four chemical nucleotides/bases which are the language you code it in:
