\u2018This is truly an epigenetic effect,\u2019 points out Tessarz. Epigenetic (epi-above; genome-all genetic information) refers to changes in the way the DNA is expressed or read, but without alterations in the DNA itself. \u2018It was just a very lucky coincidence that when I started my lab, this paper came out and epigenetics in ageing kind of became a thing.\u2019<\/p>\n His research focuses on how the metabolism impacts the epigenome and thereby regulates how genes are expressed or turned off in the context of ageing. \u2018Metabolism changes quite dramatically when we age. Actually, one of the few ways that we know nowadays work well when we want to live longer and healthier, is to place a lot of emphasis on how we eat and what we eat,\u2019 explains Tessarz. Many of the diseases that we die of have ageing as the main risk factor – if you can tackle ageing, you likely also directly tackle all these diseases. \u2018Virtually every process at a cellular level is impacted somehow by ageing. The question now is whether it is the driver, or it is just sitting somewhere in that car. Epigenetics has a good chance of being one of the drivers here, as does metabolism.\u2019<\/p>\n Tessarz and his lab are really interested in how these processes are affected by the surroundings of cells. Tissues are not homogeneous lumps of cells. \u2018Within a tissue there are microenvironments, which can be high or low in oxygen, in certain hormones and so on, depending on their location. What we are trying to understand is how changes with age in these tissue environments impact the metabolism-epigenetics crosstalk and the rejuvenation attempts we are trying to establish.\u2019<\/p>\n ‘The recent increase in lifespan often comes with a much longer time of suffering’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This complexity is not easy to tackle \u2013 \u2018this will keep me busy until the end of my career,\u2019 confesses the researcher with a smile \u2013 but they have promising discoveries. \u2018If you understand how this crosstalk works, it’s fairly easy to interfere in metabolic pathways, either by changing diet or with drugs \u2013 and we\u2019ve shown this\u2019. In a type of stem cells, Tessarz\u2019 lab identified what was going wrong in the metabolism due to ageing and managed to rescue the defect, essentially rejuvenating the cells. \u2018But this is in a dish. A long-term goal would be to use similar strategies to positively impact, for instance, health span and cancer therapy, because dysregulated metabolism plays a huge role in tumor development,\u2019 says Tessarz. According to the researcher, there are developments in many different fields that people who are now growing old will strongly benefit from.<\/p>\n In the end, perhaps the secret of the supercentenarians is not so much about finding the fountain of youth, but rather an improved quality of life. \u2018The recent increase in lifespan often comes with a much longer time of suffering, people lay in bed, they have to be cared for.\u00a0 What we would really like to do as a field is to shorten this time when people suffer and increase the time when they can live their life in a healthy state.\u2019<\/p>\n Het bericht Can we tweak cells to reset their ageing clock?<\/a> verscheen eerst op Vox magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ageing is the main risk factor for the vast majority of diseases – yet we know surprisingly little about why it makes us so vulnerable. Researchers at the Radboud Institute for Molecular Life Sciences are looking for answers at a cellular and molecular scale. \u2018Ageing is not necessarily a one-way street, but it\u2019s instead kind of malleable.\u2019<\/p>\n Het bericht Can we tweak cells to reset their ageing clock?<\/a> verscheen eerst op Vox magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.voxweb.nl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/K1_7193.jpg\")
<\/a>Long-term goal<\/h4>\n