![]() (Outside of the lab, epigenetic changes can be driven by a number of things, including smoking, exposure to pollution and chemicals.) Once “aged” in this way, within a matter of weeks Sinclair saw that the mice began to show signs of older age-including grey fur, lower body weight despite unaltered diet, reduced activity, and increased frailty. ![]() They mimicked the effects of aging on the epigenome by introducing breaks in the DNA of young mice. ![]() In the mice, he and his team developed a way to reboot cells to restart the backup copy of epigenetic instructions, essentially erasing the corrupted signals that put the cells on the path toward aging. “But by showing that we can reverse the aging process, that shows that the system is intact, that there is a backup copy and the software needs to be rebooted.” “If the cause of aging was because a cell became full of mutations, then age reversal would not be possible,” he says. It’s similar to the way software programs operate off hardware, but sometimes become corrupt and need a reboot, says Sinclair. His latest results seem to support that theory.
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