Mytho, discovered the anti-aging gene that helps you age healthily

Is called Mytho, helps you age healthily and improves your quality of life. We are talking about a gene that was previously unknown, preserved almost identical in many species, from worms to humans, and which was discovered thanks to international research that lasted nine years and led by the University of Padua.

An all-Italian discovery

Under study, published on Journal of Clinical Investigation, the University of Bologna, the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine of Pozzuoli and the Istituto Superiore di Sanità also contributed. Researchers have shown that turning off this gene makes cells age faster, while activating it can maintain a good state of health for a long time.

“It was a long and demanding job that involved many national and international centres, because when you study the part of the genome that is still unknown you start from scratch and the risk of not finding anything interesting is high”, he explains Marco Sandri of the University of Padua and the Veneto Institute of Molecular Medicine, which coordinated the research. “The majority of our genetic code is still unknown, for example more than 5 thousand genes that code for proteins out of a total of 20 thousand are still completely unknown. For this reason, in recent years, we have used resources and energy to characterize this unexplored part of our DNA”.

The mechanism of autophagy

The authors of the study, which he sees as the first signatories Anaïs Franco Romero And Valeria Morbidoni, started from a computer search to identify potential genes involved in the mechanisms that control the quality of proteins and cellular structures, finding four candidates. “We focused on the Mytho gene because it appeared to play a role in autophagy, the only mechanism that allows cells to remove damaged molecules and other structures,” says Sandri.

“It is a mechanism that is activated under conditions of stress and in many pathologies related to aging they are caused by its deactivation.” In fact, the observation of this important mechanism earned the Japanese biologist the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2016. Yoshinori Sumi.

A gene shared by different animal species

Furthermore, the gene stood out for being extremely conserved among different animal species, from the worm Caenorhabditis elegansan animal model widely used in genetics laboratories all over the world, including humans: “It is a characteristic that greatly amazed us – adds the researcher – for example the sequence of the gene in the mouse is very similar to that present in the man. This level of conservation suggests that its positive modulation could contribute to keeping the cells and the organism healthy, also because the longest-lived animals were found to be those with the highest level of activity of this gene”.

The researchers demonstrated the role of the Mytho gene not only in the worm C. elegans, but in mammalian cells and in muscle tissue biopsies from more or less elderly individuals. “Furthermore – concludes Sandri – this gene could also be involved in genetic diseases whose causes are not yet known”.

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