Mytho, the healthy long-life gene discovered

A gene called Mytho helps to age healthily and improves quality of life. It was previously unknown, conserved almost identically in many species, from worms to humans, and was discovered thanks to nine years of international research led by the University of Padua. Also contributing to the study, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, were the University of Bologna, the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine in Pozzuoli and the Istituto Superiore di Sanità. The researchers showed that switching off this gene causes cells to age faster, while activating it can maintain good health for a long time.

"It was a long and demanding job that involved many national and international centres, because when you study the still unknown part of the genome you are starting from scratch and the risk of not finding anything interesting is high," Marco Sandri of the University of Padua and the Veneto Institute of Molecular Medicine, who coordinated the research, tells Ansa. "Most of our genetic code is still unknown, for example more than 5 thousand genes coding for proteins out of a total of 20 thousand are still completely unknown. That is why, over the last few years, we have put resources and energy into characterising this unexplored part of our DNA'.

The authors of the study, whose first signatories are Anais Franco Romero and Valeria Morbidoni, started with a computer search to identify potential genes involved in mechanisms controlling the quality of proteins and cellular structures, and found 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 stressful conditions and many age-related diseases are caused by its inactivation."

The observation of this important mechanism, in fact, earned Japanese biologist Yoshinori Ōsumi the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016. The gene also stood out for being extremely conserved among different animal species, from the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, an animal model widely used in genetics laboratories around the world, to humans: 'This is a feature that amazed us a lot,' adds the researcher. 'For example, the sequence of the gene in mice is very similar to that found in humans. This level of conservation makes us think that its modulation in a positive sense can contribute to keeping cells and the organism healthy, not least because the longest-lived animals turned out 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 C. elegans worm, but in mammalian cells and in muscle tissue biopsies on older and older individuals. 'Moreover,' Sandri concludes, 'this gene may also be involved in genetic diseases whose causes are not yet known.