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Article: MIT helps unlock life-extending secrets of calorie restriction.
- Article from:
- Drug Week
- Article date:
- January 30, 2004
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2004 JAN 30 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Shedding light on why drastically restricting calorie intake prolongs lifespan in some organisms, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers report that lowering the level of a common coenzyme activates an anti-aging gene in yeast.
Calorie restriction extends lifespan in a wide spectrum of organisms, and has been shown to delay the onset or reduce the incidence of many age-related diseases, including cancer and diabetes. No one is sure why it works.
MIT biology professor Leonard P. Guarente discovered in 2000 that calorie restriction activates the silenced information regulator (SIR2) gene, which ...