Human Longevity News: Activating The Telomerase Enzyme

Telomere Primer

A telomere is a sequence of repeated nucleotides at the ends of each of your chromosomes.

They are there to stop the ends of the chromosomes from deteriorating and to also stop them from merging with neighboring chromosomes.

They are sort of like the caps at the ends of your shoes laces.

So far, so good.
 

The Problem

The problem is that every time a cell in your body divides, these telomere 'shoe lace caps' get shorter. Eventually after enough cell divisions they will no longer secure the ends of your chromosomes.

This effect is often described as a molecular countdown clock (see Hayflick limit).

Loss of telomere protection means a reduced ability for cells to grow and this whole process is strongly correlated with the aging process which causes weakness, illness, and eventual organ failure.

The Solution

Telomerase is a protein ribonucleoprotein that has the ability to add telomere repeat sequences to the ends of your chromosomes.

As per rcebike's helpful comment

the Telomerase enzyme is technically a ribonucleoprotein which means it needs an RNA component for it to function (like the Ribosome)

This molecular activity has the potential to add time onto the molecular clock and delay and possibly even reverse the aging process of cells.

Research from Professor Julian Chen at the School of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University has potentially discovered an important step in the enzyme catalytic cycle for telomerase .

This step limits the ability of telomerase to synthesize the telomere DNA repeats onto the ends of the chromosomes.

The mechanism described is quite involved but I will try to explain it after this descriptive quote:

"Telomerase has a built-in braking system to ensure precise synthesis of correct telomeric DNA repeats. This safe-guarding brake, however, also limits the overall activity of the telomerase enzyme," said Professor Chen. "Finding a way to properly release the brakes on the telomerase enzyme has the potential to restore the lost telomere length of adult stem cells and to even reverse cellular aging itself."

The Interpretation For Us Dummies

Okay, here's my input, this is why you read my post this far.

From what I can understand from the source article and the above quote and to put it into simpler language: the braking referred to in the above quote refers to a signal within the RNA encoding to pause the DNA encoding.

The pause occurs at the end of a special sequence (‘GGTTAG’)

Then when the telomerase tries to restart the DNA encoding of the next GGTTAG sequence the pause signal is still active and this mechanism limits DNA synthesis.

Dr. Chen and his team think they can target that pause signal which is preventing the restart of DNA telomere repeat encoding.

If it works this would have the potential to revive aging human adult cells.

Let's hope the technique works and doesn't start some sort of runaway cancerous processes or generate super long telomeres which gunk up the cell internals with unneeded telomeric crap.

Post Source

Arizona State University article.

Publication: Chen, Y., J.D. Podlevsky, D. Logeswaran and J.J.-L. Chen (2018). A single nucleotide incorporation step limits human telomerase repeat addition activity. EMBO. J. 37: e97953, DOI 10.15252/emboj.201797953.

Thank you for reading my post.

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