Premature aging in mice with error-prone protein synthesis.

The main source of error in gene expression is messenger RNA decoding by the ribosome. Translational accuracy has been suggested on a purely correlative basis to positively coincide with maximum possible life span among different rodent species, but causal evidence that translation errors accelerate aging in vivo and limit life span is lacking. We have now addressed this question experimentally by creating heterozygous knock-in mice that express the ribosomal ambiguity mutation RPS9 D95N, resulting in genome-wide error-prone translation.