Researchers Find Key to Longer Life Lies in Just 14 Brain Cells - at Least in Fruit Flies

The secret to long life may not be in a Fountain of Youth. It may be in the brains of fruit flies. Researchers at Brown University have just released the results of a study that began two years ago when they made the discovery that if the activity of the cancer-suppressing protein p53 is decreased, the fruit flies live much longer, at least if fruit fly time

Now they are reporting that they have just found that the p53 protein may work the same in only 14 insulin producing cells in the flies' brains.

Out of all the tens of thousands of very tiny brain cells, they were able locate the exact 14 that work to extend the flies life span.

P53 is also known s the guardian of the genome because of its ability to protect the cells against DNA damage, If there is not enough of the protein cancer can develop, too much can shorten the life spam. But back at the beginning of the research in 2005, they found that if they were to target the decrease of p53 specifically to the brain cell, the flies could live as much as 58% longer.

It took them a full year of painstaking experiments to find out exactly how it worked. They would use a batch of young flies that had been genetically altered to reduce the activity in just a small portion of their nervous systems and watched them as they aged. Over and over the flies died at about two months, which is the average life span of a fly.

The next thing they wanted to find out was if there was any caloric restriction at work, since studies have shown that a diet low in calories can increase the lifespan of not only flies, but worms, mice and rats as well. The end result they are looking for is to see if restricting calories works in people and if there could be drugs developed that could mimic effects.

So, they did just that and restricted the diets of the flies and ran the tests again. The flies on the restricted diet did not live any longer when p53 was reduced in the insulin producing cell, which supported the idea that p53 reduction is one of the effects of reducing calories.

But when they manipulated 14 of the insulin produce cells in the flies' brains, they lived about 15 to 20% longer. They ran the experiment over and over again and to the same result each time.

And they were able to link the results in the flies to humans because the 14 insulin-producing cells are the equivalent of beta cells in the human pancreas. These beta cells make and release insulin, which is the hormone that controls the level of glucose in the blood. They found that when the activity of p53 drops, so des the insulin responsive activity in the fat body, the major metabolic organ in the fruit fly

Putting it all together after 2 years of research the findings suggest that lifespan regulation is linked to metabolic regulation and further more, there is a link between aging and diabetes and they hope to be able to develop a new model for studying diabetes and other metabolic diseases.

The lead researcher of the project is Johannes Bauer, a postdoctoral research fellow at Brown. The senior scientist is Brown biology professor Stephen Helfand. The rest of the team is made up of senior research assistants Suzanne Hosier and Chengyi Chang and undergraduate students Siti Nur Sarah Morris, Sandra Andersen, and Joshua Waitzman.

The research was funded by The National Institute on Aging, the Donaghue Foundation, the Ellison Medical Foundation and the American Federation for Aging Research.

Source: Brown University http://www.brown.edu/