Understanding the epigenetic processes that affect the way people age will be the focus of doctoral research by a Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington student, who has been awarded a prestigious scholarship to Cambridge University.
Ben Roberts, who is currently completing a Master of Science in Biology, has been awarded a Cambridge-Rutherford Memorial PhD Scholarship by the Royal Society Te Apārangi. He will apply to study at Cambridge’s Babraham Institute, where he plans to research epigenetics and how they influence the ageing process.
Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene activity that do not involve alterations in the DNA sequence. It describes the way DNA is expressed in a particular cell—genes can be turned on and off and therefore cells can function differently over time.
Ben says there’s a relatively new theory that a root cause of ageing might be epigenome dysfunction, where the instructions about which genes should be switched on and off gets disturbed over time.
He plans to research two areas: epigenetic clocks and epigenetic reprogramming. “It’s quite a new area of science, but one that could potentially have a huge impact on health outcomes,” he explains.
“The idea behind epigenetic clocks is looking for biomarkers, which give an idea of how old someone is biologically. Obviously you can measure chronological age, but that’s often not a very good indicator of how functional their body is.
“If you want to help people live longer and devise treatments to make their bodies more functional and healthy, you need to be able to accurately measure their biological age. But there’s not currently a very good way to do that, so that’s what I’d like to work on with this scholarship.”
He says if it can be confirmed that epigenomes do have a causal relationship with ageing, then further research can be done to test which interventions—such as reprogramming the damaged epigenomes directly, or trying out different drugs or diet/exercise regimes—might cause the epigenomes to change back to a ‘younger’ (cellularly and biologically healthier) state.
“Importantly, I’ll be able to get a better understanding of how the epigenome actually works and then that will be able to be broadly applied to further work on epigenetic clocks and epigenetic reprogramming,” Ben says.
“Understanding the way epigenetic networks change as we age, and influence how we age, should help us understand the ageing process and hopefully provide novel treatments for age-related diseases. It’s very exciting to be working on this.”