Sirtuins are a family of seven genes linked to aging that regulate longevity across multiple species, including humans.

“Well, it's a family of genes. We have seven of these, what we call sirtuins, and we linked them to aging when I was a postdoc at MIT, back in the 1990s. And what we were looking at, as a group, was what can make yeast cells live longer? And there was one mutation that led us to a gene called SIR2, S-I-R-2, which stands for silent information regulator number two. And information is the key, but we'll get to that later. But this set of sirtuin genes, this family, has been shown in yeast and worms and flies, mice, and now humans, to be a really important central regulator of longevity.”