Research Perspective|Volume 1, Issue 12|pp 1017—1022

The central role of chromatin maintenance in aging

Gianluca Pegoraro¹, Tom Misteli¹

¹National Cancer Institute, NIH, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA

Received: November 30, 2009Accepted: December 8, 2009Published: December 9, 2009

Copyright: © 2009 Pegoraro et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Epigenetic regulation of chromatin and the DNA damage response are now well appreciated key players in human aging. What contributions chromatin and DAN repair make to aging, whether they are causal, and how these relate to other aging pathways, however, is unclear. Novel insights into the aging-related molecular mechanisms that link chromatin and DNA damage repair have recently been gained by studying models of both premature and physiological aging. Here we discuss these findings and we propose a broad framework for the role of chromatin in aging to reconcile apparently contradicting evidence obtained in various experimental systems.