Genetic and Epigenetic Contributions to Longevity

Abstract SCI-1

Aging is a natural process that involves a general decline in many physiological functions resulting in loss of function and eventually death, and is also the main risk of death from almost all diseases. Therefore we reason that if we could understand the biology of aging, we could design a therapy that will not affect a single disease at a time but rather will prevent many aging related diseases. Indeed, in the field of aging we have been successful in identifying several mechanism that may be involved in aging, but even more importantly, mechanisms that are protective against aging.

Here we will summarize the efforts to implicated protective pathways in relatively healthy subjects with exceptional longevity. These subjects are part of the LonGenity (or Longevity Genes Study) at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, which gathered the clinical phenotype and performed extensive genotyping on centenarians and their offspring. We will demonstrate that genetic factors that are associated with human longevity are also heritable and may contribute not only to increase life span, but also provide a protection from age dependent disease and exceptional good health.

We also will demonstrate that aging may be modified by epigenetics mechanism and will show results from high throughput methylation studies in aging rodents and humans.