When it comes to development there are a number of steps which can be quite well defined. One, of course, is death. Another is birth. Then there is sexual maturity and for some people menopause. There are plenty of papers which link precocious puberty with early menopause. There are also those which link early menopause with higher mortality and earlier age based diseases. This points to those being driven by the mRNA splicing changes and other changes in mRNA transcription primarily from the average mitochondrial membrane potential. I was wondering recently, however, about birth. Is that step potentially driven by MMP. There are a number of pieces of evidence that point to this. One is that mothers who were born prematurely are also likely to have premature children. Importantly people who are born prematurely also face health problems in their lives at an earlier stage. An overview of adult health outcomes after preterm birth " Large cohort studies have shown that
I recently attended the British Society for Research on Aging annual scientific conference which was held this year in Birmingham. There were a number of interesting talks and about 45 posters were presented. This included one from me. The details in that poster can be seen on this link . One benefit of conferences which are in person is that conversations can continue after the presentations and issues can be refined through discussions either in the corridors or over food. The area I am particularly interested in is how the links between mitochondrial efficiency and the genome operate. I managed to refine my understanding of two of the aspects here. The Citric Acid Bicycle The first area I managed to refine is to understand the mechanisms that underpin citrate efflux from the mitochondria. To understand this fully it is perhaps best to consider the operation of two citric acid cycles. In fact realistically it is a Citric Acid Bicycle - as the two cycles are linked. Th