SENS5- Maintaining Telomere Length

Presentation from the SENS5 conference
Anti aging oligos 5′-(TTAGGG)n-3′ treatment maintaining telomere length in vitro in human skin cells overcoming senescence and the t-loop deletion factor

Telomere shortening is thought to play a role in cellular aging contributing to human aging and longevity. Critical telomere shortening affects different genes, as the human genome varies, which is why the cascades differ, hence the different effects and organ failures. For years telomere length maintenance has been targeted. However there was no one treatment to keep the length within the normal limits. Variations of telomere shortening occur within same type of tissue, as well as different tissue types, from same and different individuals. Also very little is known about ratios comparing old cells with short telomeres to new cells with normal telomeres, among same and different tissues and individuals. Many telomere shortening factors have been considered, including the t-loop deletion factor and 5′-(TTAGGG)n-3′ oligos, in order to find treatment that works. However it still takes trial and error to adapt the dose levels and administrating the treatment frequencies, according to the individual genes and their interaction with the environment. Additional difficulties arose when the treatment was to be cheap, as well as testing it. Treating human skin cells with 5′-(TTAGGG)1-50-3′ oligos overcomes senescence and the t-loop deletion factor. The difficult part is the dose and administration frequencies. Overall as expected the longer the oligomer, the lower the administration frequencies. Doses are according to transfection efficiencies, in this experiment of DEAE-Dextran. Additional immortality control is required to take cells into a new culture and stop their treatment to see if they will immortalise, which will indicate too higher dose and/or too frequent. The opposite will be if the cells live as long as the non treated cells control, which would indicate lower dose and/or lower frequency of treatments. Cheap, easy, effective and sufficient test was simply cell counting. Different cell dyes were also tested. Culturing is efficient with both CO2 incubator and/or electric blanket. However the electric blanket after you manage to maintain the correct temperature in the dish requires also pH regulation every 3 hours. Cell counting is easier with TESCO-food-colours. Every little helps. Every microscope with eyepiece x10 and objective x20 is sufficient, OPAX-1108 was used in this experiment. Photos were obtained with 3.2MP mobile-phone-cam. Future experiments will gather more cell-lines data, target tissues, whole organs and eventually extending whole human life spans. Prediction is that telomere length maintenance is tissue independent, but ratios of old cells with short telomeres to new cells with normal telomeres remains tissue dependent. This would suggest that even tissue such as blood cannot be used as parameter predictions for relative telomere length in other tissues.

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