What is Sirtuin Proteins?

The average lifespan of someone born in 1990 was 47 years. Since then, improvements and discoveries in science and medicine have added approximately two years per decade to that average. Remarkably, a child born today can expect to live more than 100 years.

Aging is a progressive process that, until recently, was thought to be accompanied by inevitable degeneration. Research at C&C Lab is focused on gaining insight into the critical molecular (Sirtuin protein) and biological drivers of aging, leading to new therapies which will improve the healthspan of the global population. Each lab at C&C has combine their collective wisdom to forge a new path toward a future with reduced disease and improved health as we grow older.

Sirtuins are a class of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide-consuming enzymes that are implicated in numerous biological pathways and are considered a promising target for treating human diseases. There are seven sirtuins in mammals, SIRT1–7.

Sirtuins are a class of evolutionarily conserved protein deacetylases and ADP-ribosyltransferases. Many of them have been closely associated with aging mechanisms and potential antiaging interventions based on research in this area have been investigated in the past decade. However, accompanying their rising fame, the debates on the functional roles of sirtuins in aging regulation and their involvement in age-associated diseases, such as cancer, heated up, not only in the scientific community, but also among the general public. C&C have developed sirtuin-based antiaging supplement.

Sirtuins and their pharmacological activators/inhibitors have been associated with a range of neuroprotective effects or disease modifying influences in neurological disorders.

Sirtuins are a family of protein deacylases related by amino acid sequence and cellular function to the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae protein Sir2 (Silent Information Regulator-2), the first of this class of enzymes to be identified and studied in detail. Based on its initially discovered activity, Sir2 was classified as a histone deacetylase that removes acetyl groups from histones H3 and H4.

The acetylation/deacetylation of these particular substrates leads to changes in transcriptional silencing at specific loci in the yeast genome, hence its name. Sirtuins, however, have been shown to regulate a wide variety of cellular processes beyond transcriptional repression in varied subcellular compartments and in different cell types.

The seven mammalian sirtuins (SIRT1–SIRT7) are NAD+-dependent enzymes involved in a broad range of cellular pathways relevant to energy metabolism, cellular stress responses, genomic stability, and tumorigenesis. While SIRT1 has been at the forefront of sirtuin research, functional insights regarding SIRT2–SIRT7 are rapidly accumulating. There is now a large literature demonstrating that mammalian sirtuins suppress a variety of age-associated pathologies to promote healthspan. Also, new evidence reveals that increased expression of SIRT1 or SIRT6 extends human lifespan. Pharmacologic targeting of sirtuins—either directly with specific activators or indirectly with interventions to boost cellular NAD+ levels—has been proposed as one means of treating or preventing age-associated disease.

Our laboratory focuses on understanding the role that mitochondria play in human aging and disease. Mitochondria are dynamic organelles that provide cells with energy even during dramatic changes in diet, stress and development. Mitochondria are also a major site for reactive oxygen species production, ion homeostasis, and apoptosis. Not surprisingly, mitochondrial dysfunction has been implicated in aging, neurodegeneration and metabolic diseases, such as diabetes.

The regulation of aging is highly conserved. For example, an extra copy of SIR2 (silent information regulator; sirtuins) significantly increases the lifespan of yeast, worms and flies. Mammals have seven homologs of SIR2, three of which are found in mitochondria. Recent studies have shown that sirtuins affect mitochondrial biogenesis and energy production. Our research have shown that Sirtuin protein cure the common of aging, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, stroke and neurodegeneration in human.