Study of gene shows it may cut life short
By: Reuters
Boston Globe, January 22, 2002
WASHINGTON - A gene named after one of the Greek
Fates seems to indeed hold a person's life in the balance, cutting short
one's allotted time on this planet, researchers said last week.
One version of the gene, called klotho, is much more
common in newborns than in 65-year-olds, which suggests it does something
to reduce lifespan, said the team at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, working with a group in Czechoslovakia.
''It seems that carrying two copies of this gene is
detrimental to survival,'' Dan Arking, who is studying human genetics and
who led the work, said in an interview. ''We found that infants that have
two copies of the variant, one from each parent, have a frequency of about
3 percent in the populations we looked at.''
But only 1.1 percent of the people over 65 they
checked carried two copies of the changed gene, the researchers reported
in last week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences.
''So, those people are dying off,'' Arking said.
Klotho was one of the three Greek Fates - goddesses
who controlled each person's lifespan. Klotho, whose name meant
''spinner,'' spun the thread of life. Lakhesis measured the thread and
Atropos cut it.
The Hopkins team looked at the genes of more than
2,000 ethnically distinct people - 611 infants and 435 elderly Bohemian
Czechs over the age of 75, a mixed group of central Europeans, and people
of both European and African descent living near Baltimore.
''What's so striking about the klotho variant is that
it is relatively common and has its effect by age 65,'' Arking said.
''About a quarter of the population had one variant copy, making them
carriers.''
The researchers do not know what the gene does. It is
not associated with any disease - yet.
Arking said his team was building on work done by
Japanese scientists, who created mice that did not have any klotho gene.
''They showed mice with deficient klotho age prematurely,'' Arking said.
''What was intriguing was that they aged like humans.
They get atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, emphysema: These are
characteristics of aging that are not normally associated with mice.''
There is a lot more work to be done, Arking stressed,
before it will be useful to know whether a person has the ''early death''
version of klotho.
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