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 strand of DNA - becomes faster with age but less precise and more error-prone; they also found that certain processes could help us reverse this decline. …
The “machine” - as Beyer calls it - responsible for making the transcription copy of the gene sequences is called Pol II (RNA polymerase II).
And what his team discovered was that the process of transcription gets faster as we age, and this accelerated transcription causes Pol II to make more mistakes, leading to essentially “bad” copies that can lead to numerous diseases.
“If Pol II gets too fast, it makes more mistakes, and then the sequence is not identical anymore to the genome sequence. The consequences are similar to what you have when there are mutations in the genome itself,” Beyer said.
“Our study is saying that, for instance, having a healthy diet or, this caloric restriction intervention, would improve the quality of the transcription of the RNA production in the cell. And this would then have beneficial effects for the cells in the long run”.
The findings could help prevent cancer from manifesting, Papantonis notes, as “it’s a late-life disease because of errors. Constraining errors might be a way of constraining cancer emergence or late-life disease”.
Research Paper (Open access):
Ageing-associated changes in transcriptional elongation influence longevity
I think this research is clearly wrong from a mechanistic perspective. There is a lot of evidence that Pol II stalls to a much greater extent as people age. This may speed up transcription when it isn’t stalled as the substrate for transcription becomes more available.
“Our study is saying that, for instance, having a healthy diet or, this caloric restriction intervention, would improve the quality of the transcription of the RNA production in the cell. And this would then have beneficial effects for the cells in the long run”.
It goes down again to caloric restriction. Rapamycin mimics it.
In Chapter 6 of the 2nd edition of my book Rapamycin, mTOR, Autophagy & Treating mTOR Syndrome, I wrote about how rapamycin reduces the rate of errors in protein translation (page 57-58). I wonder if this is connected to or related to Pol II…???