Each year, we at The Scientist devote a handful of our monthly issues to life-science topics that are so interesting or fast-moving that a feature alone would not suffice. This year, these included aging, HIV, hearing, and obesity. Read on for recaps of TS’s special issues, 2015.
Aging is complex. It’s a whole-organism process that happens over a lifetime. It happens at the level of the genome—telomeres, DNA repair processes, and epigenetic modifications have all been linked to aging—as well as the level of proteins. Protein misfolding, mitochondrial dysfunction, and stem cell activity are also prime aging suspects. We at The Scientist tackled the diverse molecular dynamics underlying aging in the lead feature story in our special issue on aging. Two other features explored how diet affects aging and the role of retrotransposon-induced DNA damage. In the Literature section, we tackled collagen remodeling in C. elegans and growth-hormone signaling in mice. There’s no way we could have covered it all.
And there’s no way researchers will understand it all unless they are more open with their data, argues University College London and EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute postdoc Matthias Ziehm in an opinion piece on the need to share annotated longevity data. One question that the field is anxious to answer: How do we stay healthy as we live longer?
While today’s antiretroviral therapies keep HIV under control, there’s a long way to go before the virus can be considered defeated. One nagging problem is medicine’s inability to consistently and completely eliminate HIV from the body. The virus lurks in an inactive form that escapes detection by the immune system. Sussing out these hidden reservoirs will be critical to treat patients and eradicate HIV. Understanding where the virus replicates will also be important. Another major line of HIV research focuses on vaccine development. If we can prevent transmission, one day we won’t have to fight the infection.
