Calorie restriction and sirtuins revisited (original) (raw)

1. Leonard Guarente1
2. Department of Biology, Glenn Laboratory for the Science of Aging, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA

Abstract

Calorie or dietary restriction (CR) has attracted attention because it is the oldest and most robust way to extend rodent life span. The idea that the nutrient sensors, termed sirtuins, might mediate effects of CR was proposed 13 years ago and has been challenged in the intervening years. This review addresses these challenges and draws from a great body of new data in the sirtuin field that shows a systematic redirection of mammalian physiology in response to diet by sirtuins. The prospects for drugs that can deliver at least a subset of the benefits of CR seems very real.

• CR mimetics
• calorie restriction
• sirtuins

Footnotes

• ↵1 Correspondence
  E-mail leng{at}mit.edu

• Article is online at http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gad.227439.113.
  Freely available online through the Genes & Development Open Access option.

• © 2013 Guarente; Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

This article, published in Genes & Development, is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.