Elixir of youth? New anti-ageing hope with pill made from human GUT bacteria – Express.co.uk

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The elusive 'elixir of youth' pill is a major step nearer after the discovery of bacterial genes and compounds that not only extended life, but slowed down tumour growth and the build up of amyloid-beta, a compound associated with Alzheimer's disease.

Scientists at Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas Health Science Centre in the US hope one day a simple pill could play a vital role in slowing down ageing.

Dr Meng Wang, an Associate Professor of molecular and human genetics at Baylor, said: "The scientific community is increasingly aware that our body's interactions with the millions of microbes in our bodies, the microbiome, can influence many of our functions, such as cognitive and metabolic activities and ageing.

"In this work we investigated whether the genetic composition of the microbiome might also be important for longevity."

The study used the laboratory worm C. elegans, a transparent, simple organism that is as long as a pinhead and shares essential characteristics with human biology.

We think that C. elegans is a wonderful system in which to study the connection between bacterial genes and aging

Dr Meng Wang

During its two to three week long lifespan, the worm feeds on bacteria, develops into an adult, reproduces, and progressively ages, loses strength and health and dies.

Prof Wang explained: "We think that C. elegans is a wonderful system in which to study the connection between bacterial genes and aging because we can very fine tune the genetics of microbes and test many genes in the worm in a relatively short time."

To test the effect of individual bacterial genes on the lifespan of the worms they employed a complete gene-deletion library of bacterium E. coli. These each lacked one of close to 4,000 genes.

Prof Wang said: "We fed C. elegans each individual mutant bacteria and then looked at the worms' life span.

"Of the nearly 4,000 bacterial genes we tested, 29, when deleted, increased the worms' lifespan.

"Twelve of these bacterial mutants also protected the worms from tumour growth and accumulation of amyloid-beta, a characteristic of Alzheimer's disease in humans."

Further experiments found some of the bacterial mutants increased longevity by acting on some of the worm's known processes linked to ageing.

Other mutants encouraged longevity by over-producing the polysaccharide colanic acid.

When the purified colanic acid was given to C. elegans, the worms also lived longer.

Colanic acid also showed similar effects in the laboratory fruit fly and in mammalian cells cultured in the lab.

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She suggested it might be possible in the future to design preparations of bacteria or their compounds that could help slow down the ageing process.

Colanic acid mediates crosstalk between bacteria and mitochondria.

In particular colanic acid regulated the fusion-fission dynamics of mitochondria, the structures that provide the energy for the cell's functions.

Prof Wang added: "These findings are also interesting and have implications from the biological point of view in the way we understand host-microbe communication

"Mitochondria seem to have evolved from bacteria that millions of years ago entered primitive cells.

"Our finding suggests that products from bacteria today can still chime in the communication between mitochondria in our cells.

"We think that this type of communication is very important and here we have provided the first evidence of this.

"Fully understanding microbe-mitochondria communication can help us understand at a deeper level the interactions between microbes and their hosts."

The study was published in the journal Cell.

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