This suggests an interesting way to test the theory. JCVI had their “minimal cell” a few years back: they took a bacteria with an already-pretty-small genome, stripped out everything they could while still maintaining viability, then synthesized a plasmid with all the genes and promoters but with the “junk” DNA between them either removed or randomized (to make sure there was no functionality hiding in there which they didn’t know about), and grew the bacteria with the synthesized plasmid. More recently, they have a project to do something similar with yeast.
Once this sort of project scales up to mammals, I expect they’ll try it with mice/rats, and removing transposons is an obvious step. One prediction from the transposon theory of aging is that, when they do so, they’ll find that their mice are far longer-lived and have near-zero rates of cancer, heart disease, etc.
You don’t need to go through that much work. When we want to study what happens when a certain protein isn’t expressed we usually don’t remove the relevant gene from the genome but do gene knockdown via siRNA.
If we know all the active transposons we can create a DNA string that codes for a lot of siRNA for all the transposons we are concerned about and only need to do one injection into the genome.
The technology is there. If nobody has done the experiment it’s just the matter of talking anybody with a lab that cares about mice lifespan to run it (and maybe for a grant giver to spend a few hundred thousand).
If it’s true that transposons are more central to aging than a lot of the people in the field think, this would likely mean that it’s harder to fix aging invivo than many people in the anti-aging field want to think. There are also no clear medical interventions you can do with the knowledge.
As far as the size of the actual sum for the experiment goes, I don’t have the expertise to reliably estimate the cost and you would need to ask someone with more knowledge on how to do genetic engineering for that.
This suggests an interesting way to test the theory. JCVI had their “minimal cell” a few years back: they took a bacteria with an already-pretty-small genome, stripped out everything they could while still maintaining viability, then synthesized a plasmid with all the genes and promoters but with the “junk” DNA between them either removed or randomized (to make sure there was no functionality hiding in there which they didn’t know about), and grew the bacteria with the synthesized plasmid. More recently, they have a project to do something similar with yeast.
Once this sort of project scales up to mammals, I expect they’ll try it with mice/rats, and removing transposons is an obvious step. One prediction from the transposon theory of aging is that, when they do so, they’ll find that their mice are far longer-lived and have near-zero rates of cancer, heart disease, etc.
You don’t need to go through that much work. When we want to study what happens when a certain protein isn’t expressed we usually don’t remove the relevant gene from the genome but do gene knockdown via siRNA.
If we know all the active transposons we can create a DNA string that codes for a lot of siRNA for all the transposons we are concerned about and only need to do one injection into the genome.
The technology is there. If nobody has done the experiment it’s just the matter of talking anybody with a lab that cares about mice lifespan to run it (and maybe for a grant giver to spend a few hundred thousand).
If there’s any reason to suspect grant-givers to be uninformed on the topic, or biased against it, crowd-sourcing a sum of that size sounds possible.
If it’s true that transposons are more central to aging than a lot of the people in the field think, this would likely mean that it’s harder to fix aging invivo than many people in the anti-aging field want to think. There are also no clear medical interventions you can do with the knowledge.
As far as the size of the actual sum for the experiment goes, I don’t have the expertise to reliably estimate the cost and you would need to ask someone with more knowledge on how to do genetic engineering for that.
Good point, this also suggests that Genome Project-Write is an important project.