National Institutes of Health researchers have found antibiotics have extended the lives of fruit flies. They also found it drastically changed many of the genes’ activities.
Researchers did this by feeding flies antibiotics. They monitored the lifetime activity of hundreds of genes traditionally thought to control aging.
The findings were published in iScience.
“For decades scientists have been developing a hit list of common aging genes. These genes are thought to control the aging process throughout the animal kingdom, from worms to mice to humans,” senior author Edward Giniger, Ph.D., of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke said in a press release. “We were shocked to find that only about 30% of these genes may be directly involved in the aging process. We hope that these results will help medical researchers better understand the forces that underlie several age-related disorders.”
The results were accidental. Scientists fed newborn male flies antibiotics to prevent bacteria growth. They were surprised to see that the antibiotics lengthened the flies’ lives by about six days.
“This is a big jump in age for flies. In humans, it would be the equivalent of gaining about 20 years of life,” said co-lead author Arvind Kumar Shukla, Ph.D., a post-doctoral fellow on Giniger’s team. “We were totally caught off guard and it made us wonder why these flies took so long to die.”
Upon examination, the gene activity of antibiotic-fed flies changed very little with age. No matter the actual age, treated flies genetically resembled the 30-day old control flies. This was seemingly due to a plateau in about 70% of the genes researchers surveyed. Many of those genes are believed to control aging.
“At first, we had a hard time believing the results. Many of these genes are classical hallmarks of aging and yet our results suggested that their activity is more a function of the presence of bacteria rather than the aging process,” said Dr. Shukla.
That included genes that controlled stress and immunity.
The team also learned why antibiotics extended the lives of flies in the remaining 30% of the genes. That’s because the rate at which the activity of the genes changed with age was slower than normal in antibiotic-fed flies.
“We found that there are some genes that are in fact setting the body’s internal clock,” Giniger said. “In the future, we plan to locate which genes are truly linked to the aging process. If we want to combat aging, then we need to know precisely which genes are setting the clock.”
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