Friday, May 06, 2005

Send those antioxidants to your mitochondria

According to Science News Online
Peter S. Rabinovitch of the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues genetically engineered mice to overexpress a gene responsible for making the antioxidant called catalase. …

[T]he team altered some of the mice so that the extra catalase went … into mitochondria, the cell's energy-producing organelles. Mitochondria produce most of an organism's free radicals as a side effect of converting food into energy. …

[A]nimals that guided catalase to mitochondria lived significantly longer than normal mice, adding about 5 months to their normal 3-year life spans.

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