The cellular response to stressors like DNA breaks involves coordinating gene expression changes, hunkering down, and repairing the system, which can lead to disruption of chromatin structure and gene misregulation in aging.

“this is the cells way of coordinating gene expression changes hunkering down during times of adversity and going off to repair the system which in this case we study DNA breaks and that's a beautiful system when you're young it works great you get exposed to cosmic rays or you go out in the Sun you've got lots of DNA breaks eventually these proteins will go repair those breaks and then go back to where they came from to settle down the response to turn off the inflammation to turn off the DNA repair when it's not needed but the problem we think is it's antagonistic pleiotropy”