Despite centuries of research and progress in medicine, there are still many mysteries that remain unresolved, chief among them being an understanding of what causes ageing and how can we slow it down or reverse it.But a new study published in scientific magazine Nature may finally have found the answers to these questions.Researchers from the University of Cologne in Germany have not only discovered that gene transcription - the process in which a cell makes an RNA copy of a piece of DNA - becomes faster with age but less precise and more error-prone, but they also found that certain processes could help us reverse this decline.“This is, so far, the only eureka moment in my life.
I mean, this is a type of discovery that you don't make every other day,” said Dr Andreas Meyer, the lead researcher, calling the findings “a major discovery”.“There’s a storm on Twitter.
Some colleagues are very excited,” he said to Euronews Next.Before Beyer and his team started their investigative project 10 years ago, the typical ageing study would “just look at differential gene expression,” says Beyer.Previous studies, he explains, were basically asking questions like “When you age, which genes are getting turned on and which genes are getting turned off?” and “How does that change the regulation or the metabolism in the cell?’”But nobody was asking how the transcription process itself changes as we age, a line of inquiry that could yield insights to ultimately help us reverse, or stop, decline.Transcription is fundamental to the research as it is the process in which a cell makes an RNA copy of a piece of DNA.This copy is important because it carries the genetic information needed to make new proteins in a cell.