Repairing telomeres without causing cancer

Stopped reading at chains

>>8808553

>Is there any way to repair telomeres and lengthen the life of a cell without causing cancer?

Yes design a biochemical feedback mechanism so cells can always know if they are in too high numbers or too numbers acording to a certain number.

This system must already exist, so its a matter of knowing.

But telomeres are are a meme, you are not going to stop your collagen from getting oxidiced or your genes from becoming pleiotropic becoming harmfull later in life or entropy in general telling you that you cannot keep yourself constant eternally without constant and increased influxes of energy to keep the system that makes you in order.

>>8808577
Non-native english speaker here, I know I suck at languages.

Sory fur me bad eenglish

>>8808588
I've been reading about "potentially immortal" beings in the animal kingdom and there's always one more obstacle to overcome before reaching "immortality".
These animals always die of "old age", maybe not the kind of old age we humans die of, but all of them reach a biological limit and pass away.

There is no proof that telomere shortening causes aging

>>8808653
this
Telomere shortening is only one of the reasons of aging
Random covalent bonding happens statistically and inevitably in the cell causing shit to accumulate and fuck things up for example

These are hastened by reactive species in the bloodstream like free radicals

>>8808653
>>8808664
These

Read this and educate yourselves:
http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(13)00645-4

>>8808553

Unfortunately not. Because with every cell division, the DNA of that cell acquires mutations. The DNA of each cell has to be copied before division, and the copy machinery is simply not perfect. That's exactly why most cells don't have telomerase activity: there is a high likelihood that they will get too many mutations and become cancerous if you let them divide many many times.

This is supported by the fact that cancers often have mutations that cause telomerase to become active again.

Now you are obviously still able to live and grow old, even though your cells continuously die off. That's because stem cells in your tissues do possess telomerase activity. These cells are an exception because they are self-renewing and can excellently repair their DNA (also some other things but that's outside the scope of this post).

So why do 33% of people get cancer and die? Because even breathing causes DNA damage to accumulate, and it only takes a single cell going haywire to form a tumor.

TL;DR: You already have all the telomerase activity that you need to grow old without getting cancer.

>>8808553
Thanks for the high school description of telomeres OP, we really needed that information.

>>8808553
>Having to explain what a telomere is and at the same time expecting to ask anyone out there knows if they can be repaired or lengthened

Yeah, ageing is a very broad thing that doesn't manifest itself through one mechanism. Telomeres are like your hard limit for ageing, while the imperfect DNA copying from polymerases and DNA damage through radicalization are also parts of it.

Not only this, but all different kinds of base swaps (transition and tranversion), strain sheering (single strand, double strand break), DNA remodelling,(retro)transposon shenanigans and other stuff trying to mess with your shit (mutagens/carcinogens (kinda synonyms), pathogens, ...) there's just a limited amount of tools a cell is equipped with to try to stay in homeostasis. And it's starting off with an imperfect system at that so... we're kinda fucked lel.

We need to change a whooooooooooooole lot before biological immortality is possible

>>8808553
>This is somewhat long so I'll try to sum it up quickly:
>proceeds to describe what a chromosome is in a science board

File: 1385337330170.png (337KB, 418x398px) Image search: [Google]

337KB, 418x398px

>>8808577
>>8808588
>>8808611
>>8808700
>>8808888