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RE: Biological Imperfectness Sums Up the Several Theories of Aging

in #steemstem6 years ago

Hey @kingabesh, thanks for such a great article, had fun reading it!

antaganostic pleiotropy

I think this is a typo, and that antagonistic pleiotropy is what you aimed for :)

However, I would have few things to add/discuss about this topic.

This is because reactive oxygen species are only produced in organisms that make use of oxygen. In organisms that do not make use of oxygen (anaerobic organisms), they would have no place. So are we saying that anaerobic organisms do not age.

ROS are not only free radical species that exist, for example sulphur radicals are of the most abundant free radical species, and extremely damaging for cells, since they exhibit similar redox potential as ROS. Just because anaerobic bacteria don't use oxigen to survive, that doesn't mean that they're resistant to free radicals damage.

Personally I really don't appreciate the article you cited, because it contains some contradictory/incorrect statements, such as that aging still occurs under anaerobic conditions, where there is little ROS represents evidence against role of ROS in the aging process. Moreover:

Cellular damage generated as a result of imperfectness would certainly include oxidative damage. However, the latter, like any other damage form, would only represent a subset of total damage, which, regardless of its contribution to the regulation of lifespan, would have nothing to do with the cause of aging (9, 10).

Even if I would understand this particular sentence from the review paper, it would still mean little to me since the author cited only himself (references 9 and 10) :)

I would agree with you that aging is still not completely understood, however, there are factors acting combined known to have lesser and/or bigger impact on aging, such as oxidative stress, glycation, telomere shortening, and chronological age — along with various genes.

At the end, I would like to share a link to an interesting article which shows that premature aging in genetically engineered mice can be reversed by reactivating their telomerases. Although we cannot conclude from these results that activating telomerase in humans would slow down the aging process, this research certainly represents one step further towards our understanding of particular biological process.

After all, it's science we're talking here, and unfortunately we don't have a luxury of certainty as non-scientific theories do ;)

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Appreciate this contribution from an expert in this field :) I’m aware of other free radical species like the RNS and I do not know if I am totally correct but the ROS should be more implicated in inducing oxidative stress and maybe that’s where the authors are coming from but thinking about the fact that they tried to discredit a probable role of free radicals in causing aging in anaerobic bacteria, it raises eyebrows as we have other free radicals that are not products of oxygen. Hopefully, we fully understand aging someday :). Interesting paper you cited btw.

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