Wow, y'all. This is such a ridiculously cool and thorough study....
I mean exactly zero slight to Nature Communications, but until I took the above screenshot from the PDF, I really assumed this was one word Nature. The latter seems to really dig aging mechanism studies (as do I, and not just because of my recent funding sources, getting old is dumb and I'd prefer to do less of it than I currently am) and this is the most complete work I've read in the last year or two.
On the note of high profile aging studies in one word journals, where this one particularly shines in comparison to a whole lot recently is here
They provided all of the data that they are legally allowed to under the laws of their country and their continent. And even that can be obtained by filing a request to access it, just like getting patient tumor genomics data from the CPTAC consortium.
AND this study an absurd amount of data. Proteomics is the tiniest part of it.
In fact - the 34th experiment described in the method section - is the proteomics.
They looked at knock-downs of the target protein and overexpression in a slew of model organisms. They followed these organisms over their lifespan and found that more of it increases lifespan and less does the opposite. There is fancy microscopy and ROS assays and transcriptomics - and confirmation of those results with qPCR / RTPCR and then they transfected human cells and that's where the proteomics comes in.
THEN (Get this)
They looked at a cohort of obviously super cool people in their 90s who are like "hell yeah, you can see why I'm still crushing the 75 year olds on the pickleball court" and they looked at sequence variants.
And they f'ing find some! That's the data you can't have by just clicking on the link in the paper. The SNPs aren't an absolute homerun, but it looks like something is there. And if you consider all of the environmental exposures and differences in diet and experiences that people have were hanging out on this planet being cool before velcro was invented seeing something from single nucleotide polymorphisms of a protein that is basically completely unknown (look it up, you'll get a bunch of nothing) before this paper is a huge deal.
I could keep going on about what an inspirational work and what a complete and exciting story it is. It's a short read as long as you stay out of the supplemental and source data. And since I don't want you to think I've slipped off of my game as a cantankerous critical blogger, the source data is a little tough to follow. It's all there, but I had to go back and forth between figures and sheets to a couple times to sort out what I was looking at (or scroll way way down).
Again, that's just me being a jerk as this is by far my favorite thing I've read recently.
Bravo to this team and I'm super pumped for the follow-up studies they're clear are in progress.
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