England (Commonwealth Union) – Scientists across the world have often linked factors such as diet, environmental and psychological factors to have a lasting impact later in life. Some researchers have also used these conditions to determine how health might be impacted later on in life and to determine their possible lifespan. Most people can vouch for the fact that early life experiences have lasting impressions later on in life, which now gets a genetic validation with new research conducted by the University College London (UCL) researchers.
The study found that gene expression ‘memory’ may continue across the lifespan, and may provide a novel target for enhancing late-life health. “Health in old age partially depends on what a person experienced in their youth or even in the womb. Here, we have identified one way in which this happens, as changes in gene expression in youth can form a ‘memory’ that impacts health more than half a lifetime later,” explained lead author Dr Nazif Alic of the UCL Institute of Healthy Ageing and UCL Biosciences.
Researchers were expanding on prior studies where they had discovered fruit flies who were given high sugar diets in early life lived shorter even with improved diets in adulthood, where they identified the mechanism possibly detailing the finding. The previous study saw researchers discover that a high-sugar diet hinders a transcription factor known as dFOXO that plays a role in glucose metabolism and is known from a variety of studies to impact longevity, with this knowledge they attempted to bring about the opposite effect by directly elevating the activity of dFOXO.
Transcription factors are proteins that modulate transcription, or copying, of information from DNA to messenger RNA, which is the first and vital part in gene expression.
The study had the scientists activate dFOXO by elevating its levels in female fruit flies in the first 3 weeks of the fly’s adulthood. They discovered that factors impacting early-life brought about changes to chromatin, which is a mixture of DNA and proteins that can be viewed in the sense of ‘packaging’ of DNA, that continued and led to genes being expressed differently late in life. This counteracted certain alterations that would be expected as a component of the normal ageing process, eventually enhancing health in late life and effecting the fruit flies’ lifespan over a month later.
The scientists stated that their findings may bring in ways to impact late-life health in humans as well.
“What happens early on in an animal or person’s life can affect what their genes do late in life, for better or for worse. It may be that a poor diet early in life, for example, could impact our metabolism later in life by tweaking how our genes are expressed, even after substantial dietary changes over the years – but fortunately, it may well be possible to reverse this,” explained Dr Alic, who further noted that now that they have the knowledge of the ways gene expression memory can continue across the lifespan to impact gene activity, they can possibly form procedures to restrain the alterations later in life to preserve health and permit people to stay healthy longer.
The research was backed by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Medical Research Council, and saw the participation of researchers from UCL, the University of Glasgow and Imperial College London.
Research at the UCL Institute of Healthy Ageing is attempting to find the biological mechanisms of ageing to bring about knowledge on the factors affecting age-related diseases and enhance human health at older ages, with recent research identifying genes associated with longer human lifespan, and broadening the fruit fly lifespan by 48 percent with a combination drug treatment.
