Ability to Resist Mutational Damage in Fibroblast Cells Correlates with Species Life Span (opens in new tab)

Researchers here report on an interesting in vitro exercise in the comparative biology of aging. They took fibroblast cells from ten difference mammalian species with widely divergent life spans and chemically induced DNA damage in the cells. Modern DNA sequencing approaches allow an accurate measure of the amount of mutational damage produced by this chemical treatment, which in turn allows a comparison of the degree to which cells from different species can resist such damage via the operat...