Large swathes of cellular biochemistry remain comparatively unexplored and uncategorized. Any process or cellular component discovered in the past twenty to thirty years still has, at the very least, sizable gaps in the body of knowledge relating to it. Cells as a whole are by no means fully understood at the detail level - and this is exactly why, if we want to see significant progress towards human rejuvenation in the next few decades, the approach taken has to be to reverse the known root causes of aging, while tampering as little as possible with the way in which cells work, and let the cells take care of everything else. Other approaches are based on altering the way in which cells operate. These require far too much new work and new knowledge in order to safely implement, or even understand how to produce effective results.

Today's topic is circular RNA (circRNA), a form of RNA quite prevalent in cells, but that was only discovered in the 1990s. These molecules are highly varied in form and function, and what exactly those functions might be remains largely unknown. Interestingly, the open access paper I'll point out today reports that circRNAs increase in number inside cells with advancing age, particularly in long-lived cells. Does that mean they are significant in aging? Perhaps, perhaps not. It is a topic to watch in the years ahead, but the research community is presently some distance removed from being able to answer questions of this sort regarding circRNAs. Work is still focused on the foundation of a basic understanding. The sort of extensive investigation of relationships and mechanisms that takes place for other forms of RNA still lies ahead for circRNAs.

Global accumulation of circRNAs during aging in Caenorhabditis elegans