Artificially stimulating retrotransposon activity increases mortality and accelerates a subset of aging phenotypes in .

Transposable elements (TEs) are mobile sequences of DNA that can become transcriptionally active as an animal ages. Whether TE activity is simply a by-product of heterochromatin breakdown or can contribute toward the aging process is not known. Here, we place the TE under the control of the UAS GAL4 system to model TE activation during aging.