The Hydra is consider to be biological immortal.
The Hydra is a tiny animal that can be found in just about any freshwater pond, just a few millimeters long and it has extraordinary regenerative abilities.
Some genes that regulate development are constantly on, so they are constantly rejuvenating the body. Those genes makes hydra forever young.
The genes responsible for immortality in hydra will also help in humans?How can these studies help for human beings?
Yea, question looks fine. There are some reports on study this gene responsible for immortality in Hydra.
But in the case of Human, the cause of aging is the progressive loss of stem cells. Tissue in the body can recover from damage, be it internal or external, through the generation of fresh new cells from division of stem cells residing in niches in those tissues. However with advancing age, eventually these stem cell niches become depleted and the organism, in this case people, reach the end of life. In a recent study, research found that in hydra, the gene responsible for a never ending supply of stem cells is FoxO, a fork-head box O transcription factor, which is a master genetic switch allows the expression of many genes involved in cell cycle. FoxO gene is also involved in human aging, studies going on…
Is there any gene expression data of hydra available anywhere on the web? I want to compare the gene expression of long-lived versus short-lives species in order to identify genes that are involved in regulating the speed of aging. This is important because I am looking for a good topic for my PhD dissertation that I want to be a meaningful contribution to anti-aging research.
Could you please respond directly to my email address rather than in this platform because I am legally blind and therefore it is much easier for me to process incoming information in a familiar web environment such as G-mail rather than in all the different web-environments of the different social networks.
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Thomas Hahn
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Hydra cells age and die one-by-one, but the hydra creature is indeed immortal subject the right environmental factors. Dead cells are sloughed off in the sticky foot and on the tentacles. Robin
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