Protein carbamylation is a hallmark of aging - and how to detect it

A recent paper in PNAS makes the statement in the title "Protein Carbamylation is a Hallmark of Aging. You can find it here.

They find that you can almost assess the age of a mammal by looking at the degree of carbamylation in the proteins of that mammal. I'm not 100% awake yet, so it took me a minute or two to remember what carbamylation was and why it puts up a little alarm in my head. Then I found the image above. Most of the time when I think about carbamylation, its cause its a sample prep issue.

Here is a paper that discusses this modification.  When I run Preview on a sample and it pulls up carbamylation as a modification to consider I've always assumed it is from a protein prep in which either excessive Urea was used, or Urea was used and the prep was performed at too high of a temperature. Turns out, it might be detecting old samples as well? Interesting thought, right?

Detection of this modification is very straight-forward in any search engine. In PD you just need to activate the modification in the Administration --> Maintain chemical modifications tab.

With this valuable new information, I expect y'all to get on reversing this aging stuff 'cause it kinda sucks.