September 5th, 2023

RMR update #8 at last!

Right, first the survival curves. Here's the latest. With each month that goes by it'll become more and more tempting to extract conclusions from the data, but for now I want to make very clear that nothing whatsoever can yet be concluded. Even the conspicuously high mortality of "no-mTERT" males may be just noise.

The other thing I want to include today is a taster for the data we're collecting when a group's survival curve reaches a particular mortality rate, which for the first such point is 20% dead. As you see from the curves, among males only the "no-mTERT" group has got there, while for females we're there with four groups. The analysis takes time, plus we're still putting the finishing touches to our database where everything gets stored, so all I have for you today is a taster. Also, honestly, for this data I don't even need to tell you that it means nothing yet, because it even LOOKS boring.

First off, here's the glucose tolerance data for the three groups that reached 20% mortality a few weeks ago, compared with baseline. It's very much what one would expect - all groups show a delay of maybe half an hour before glucose starts to decline from its peak, as compared to the baseline response when the mice were four months younger, but there is no obvious difference between the groups. The point when this will get interesting is when a few more groups hit 80% mortality at a few months older, because then we will see whether the glucose tolerance correlated better with chronological age or with biological age as estimated by mortality.

Sincere apologies for the hiatus, which was caused by my return to the inhuman travel schedule that was my life pre-COVID, as well as by preparation for the thoroughly triumphant second Dublin conference. Coming up for air for a few days before another long trip...

Next time (which I will REALLY try to make no more than a month from now...) I'm hoping to provide a much wider range of this "cull point" data. Bye for now!