Rhonda Patrick· PhD
clocks are not simply markers of cellular senescence they really pick up a different aspect of biology the the radiation and dna damage is kind of surprising because um i think in one of your papers looking at and this was another question i wanted to ask was where are these methylation patterns occurring in the genome are there genes that are really particularly known to be involved in aging process you know like or you know basically in just being health in general yes like are these like you know the metabolism genes or dna repair and things like that yeah i i wouldn't make that claim so let me start out by saying um so my original clock used 353 loci when we look at grim age from akilu scientist in my lab it uses over 1 000 locations in the genome and now one question is what if we removed these locations from our data and just built a new clock would we still get another good clock and the answer is yes you know i could have built alternative clocks using other locations in the genome you know on that level these locations are not unique you know and when you look at the genome and we have in principle 28 million locations in the genome are cytosines you know and i want to say a quarter of them change with age some of them gain methylation some of them lose methylation so these methylation changes like almost global you know and in that sense epigenetic clocks um look at perfect representatives of the entire what is known methylone they represent everything that's going on but you can see that maybe looking at only 300 locations this is not ideal you know having said this we certainly did look at it and say are these locations enriched you know with certain pathways and no doubt there are they are you know so sites that gain methylation with aging um are known to be located in so-called polycom group protein target sites so certain proteins that play a very important role in maintaining stem cells you know or conversely sites that play a role in cell differentiation and development so these sites tend to gain methylation with aging you know the sites that lose methylation um also are enriched with certain themes for example often they're in so-called enhancer regions you know so so um the field of epigenetics has very much characterized the genome what which parts change with aging there's wonderful review articles on it yeah um and then the the i just got on the stem cell thing that's just so interesting that a lot of those are regulating coming back to the mechanism of the clock that's really a profound insight you know that um when you look at the data you keep see seeing themes related to development tissue differentiation organ development and it is a profound insight because if you had asked an aging researcher five years ago whether developmental processes matter in aging they would have said no you know many people think of aging as noise or right wear and tear you know but these epigenetic clocks have really linked development to tissue dysfunction in a direct manner an epigenetic clock is a continuous readout that links prenatal tissues directly to um very old samples it's really blowing my mind it's actually that is it i never would have thought it does because when many people obviously studied development but these are not aging researchers you know but but these clocks really point to commonalities you know right yeah wow it's it's just it's amazing it's very interesting um i just think want to thank you so much for doing all the work that you're doing and can we'll continue to follow you know your work thank you for your interest yeah people that want to learn more about your research probably the best places wikipedia we talked about i mean yeah i've written a review article and nature reviews genetics people have written wikipedia pages then they're um you mentioned the blog by josh mitteldorf you know so there are various forms of learning about them you know well thank you steve so much i've really enjoyed this conversation great thanks oh hey you're still here i'm just sitting here mixing up next week's found my fitness premium membership benefits and they're spicy that's right almost every week we send out something cool like our bi-weekly science digest where we summarize the top news stories and science of the week or our q and a's which happen monthly or the aliquot which is our members only podcast we take clips from cool interviews like this and we add a little extra information if you want to find out more about becoming a found myfitness premium member you can click here that way we can make more cool videos like this one catch you next time you