Background: The cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) polymorphism I405V has been suggested to be involved in longevity and susceptibility to cardiovascular diseases. An enhanced reverse cholesterol transport due to enhanced HDL levels has been hypothesized to be the underlying mechanism. However, clinical trials with HDL-enhancing drugs failed to show beneficial effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: To investigate mechanisms that determine healthy aging is of major interest in the modern world marked by longer life expectancies. In addition to lifestyle and environmental factors genetic factors also play an important role in aging phenotypes. The aged immune system is characterized by a chronic micro-inflammation, known as inflamm-aging, that is suspected to trigger the onset of age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, and Diabetes Mellitus Type 2 (DMT2).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: New therapeutic targets are needed to fight aging-related diseases and increase life span. A new female-specific association with diseases and limited survival past 80 years was recently reported for a copy number variation (CNV) in the CNTNAP4 gene from the neurexin superfamily.
Objective: We asked whether there are CNVs that are associated with aging phenotypes within other genes from the neurexin superfamily and whether this association is sex specific.
Background: Aging is a biological process strongly determined by genetics. However, only a few single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have been reported to be consistently associated with aging. While investigating whether copy number variations (CNVs) could fill this gap, we focused on CNVs that have not been studied in previous SNP-based searches via tagging SNPs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCirculating nucleic acids (CNA) are known to be enriched in repetitive DNA sequences in humans. Here, bovine sera CNA were analyzed to determine if cell stress-related short interspersed nucleotide elements (SINEs) could be detected in sera from cattle associated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). Nucleic acids were extracted, amplified, cloned, and sequenced from the sera of protease-resistant prion protein (PrP(res))-positive cattle (n = 2) and sera from BSE-cohort cows (n = 6); 150 out of 163 clones revealed the presence of, on average, an 80-bp sequence from the 3' region of Bov-tA SINE.
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