Extension of Murine Life Span by Overexpression of Catalase Targeted to Mitochondria

Interestingness: 7

tl;dr 20% lifespan increase from mitochondrially hyperexpressed catalase

By Samuel E Schriner, Nancy J Linford, George M Martin,Piper Treuting, Charles E Ogburn, Mary Emond, Pinar E Coskun, Warren Ladiges, Norman Wolf, Holly Van Remmen, Douglas C Wallace and Peter S Rabinovitch in Science 308, 1909 (2005). doi: 10.1126/science.1106653

This was not published in Rejuvenation Research. It was published in Science. It was commented about by Richard Cutler in issue 3 of 2005 of Rejuvenation Research, but I couldn't find access to the comments. I did find this one though, and since it is a pretty famous result, I read it.

They overexpressed human catalase in mice in six separate lineages, two in their peroxisome, two in their nucleus and two in their mitochondria.  That is, there are four different mice lineages per experiment, two for controls, and two with the intervention, one corresponding to each of the controls. They show results per lineage with respect to their corresponding control, and I'll write them down like that too since I can't think of a better way. In all cases, the amount of catalase expressed is very high compared to wild type.

Going by the graphs, control median lifespan was about 26-27 months, and maximum lifespan (age at 10% survival, not average lifespan of top 10% like they measure in the paper (because I don't have the raw data)) at around 33 months. Expression in the nucleus extended median lifespan by 1 and 3 months (p > 0.05) with no increase in maximum lifespan. Expression in the peroxisome increased median by 3 (p > 0.05) and 3.5 months (p < 0.02) with no increase in maximum.  Expression in the mitochondria increased median by 4.5 months (p < 0.0001) and 5.5 months (p < 0.0002) with maximum lifespan increases of 4.5 months (p < 0.001 combined lineages)

Most of the paper focuses on the mitochondrial branch since it's the most impressive.  In the mitochondrial branch, there's equivalent lifespan increases for males and females. They also observe lots of good shit happening to the heart (less heart disease in general).

In what seems like a side-experiment they cross the peroxisome-expressing mice with a superoxide-dismutase expressing mice, and they get a 18.5% (p < 0.0001) median life extension with respect to wild type and 7% (p=0.036) compared to the peroxisome mice, but no maximum life extension. They note that the mitochondrially expressing mice would be a better one to try.

By the way, superoxide anion O₂^- goes to hydrogen peroxide H₂O₂ helped by superoxide dismutase. Hydrogen peroxide goes hammertime unless defused by catalase (or glutathione peroxidase).