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Ageing

Sorting out the sirtuins

Nature volume 483, pages 166–167 (2012)Cite this article

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Debates over the role of sirtuin proteins in ageing are maturing into functional assessments of the individual proteins. It seems that overexpression of a specific sirtuin can extend lifespan in male mice. See Letter p.218

Abraham Lincoln once said that God must have loved the common people because he made so many of them. Nature must feel the same way about the sirtuins, a large family of proteins that achieved celebrity status when one member was found to increase lifespan in yeast1. But are the mammalian sirtuins the rock stars of an ensemble of anti-ageing proteins, or merely members of the entourage? The original model, proposed in about 2005, that sirtuins have broadly evolutionarily conserved roles in promoting longevity per se is now being refined through more detailed functional investigations of each sirtuin2. On page 218 of this issue, Kanfi et al.3 follow this trend by reporting that overexpression of a sirtuin called SIRT6 leads to a modest extension of lifespan in male, but not female, miceFootnote 1.

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Figure 1: Potential mechanisms of action of SIRT6 on longevity.

Notes

  1. *This article and the paper3 under discussion were published online on 22 February 2012.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. David B. Lombard and Richard A. Miller are in the Department of Pathology and the Geriatrics Center, University of Michigan School of Medicine, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48100-2200, USA.,

    David B. Lombard & Richard A. Miller

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  1. David B. Lombard
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  2. Richard A. Miller
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Correspondence to David B. Lombard or Richard A. Miller.

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Lombard, D., Miller, R. Sorting out the sirtuins. Nature 483, 166–167 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10950

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