If you don't know about Telomeres yet, you're in for a surprise, especially if you find out about Lobsters!
What is a Telomere?
Telomeres are the DNA protective tips at the end of your chromasomes. Think of them like the plastic tips at both ends of a shoe lace. Chromasomes are made of DNA and live inside every cell in our body.
Telomeres are made of repeated base pairs of DNA and start life about 20,000 DNA base pairs long.
Telomeres Get Shorter with Cell Division
Every cell in your body has a limited life so must replicate itself and divide in order to keep you alive. Each cell division must produce and exact copy of the original cell in order to keep us healthy and free from degenerative disease.
With each cell division, our telomeres shorten.
When telomere length is eventually reduced to about 5000 base pairs the cell dies.
When enough of our cells have critically short telomeres, they die and inevitably so do we.
So it has become possible to determine how old someone is just by looking at Telomere length. Based
on cell division and how many times a cell can divide; while still
maintaining long enough telomeres to copy itself reliably, it is also possible to work out how long before we die.
Using this theory it has been estimated that humans can only live for about 121 years or so; by which time too many of our cells will have critically short telomeres.
But what if we can protect our Telomeres from getting shorter?
Not all of our cells behave the same. Telomeres
in cells that are associated with reproduction behave differently.
Although they still shorten with each cell division, they make use of an
enzyme called Telomerase.
Telomerase
restores and repairs the shortened telomeres so that they maintain their original length.
This needs to happen so that healthy cells can be passed on to reproductive
mechanisms to ensure that our children begin life with healthy cells contaning chromasomes with full length telomeres.
Other cells in our body can also make use of the telomerase enzyme, but don't because it is turned off by the gene
within. This means that when normal cells divide the telomere is not
repaired. This results in the eventual death of the cell and us.
Since this research came to light a lot of people have become very excited. Not only about the prospect of eternal life, but more frustratingly at seeing this as a way to make money by promoting products that can activate telomerase in all our cells.
There are ways to naturally protect Telomere length but this science is still young and the most reliable and trustworth information is always written by scientists, not by salesmen.
There are ways to naturally protect Telomere length but this science is still young and the most reliable and trustworth information is always written by scientists, not by salesmen.
What about the Lobsters?
Apparently, lobsters never age. All of their cells contain active telomerase which means their cells have no replication limit. How old is the oldest lobster anyway?!
