Chronological aging is easy to track – birthdays. Biological aging can be obvious too – graying hair, sagging skin, and other inexorable signs of impending decrepitude. But measuring biological aging isn't as easy as noting the passage of time.
The best-studied measure of biological age is the shrinking of chromosome tips, or telomeres, that do so with each division of most types of cells. As soon as I posted "Telomere Testing: Science or Snake Oil?" here at DNA Science, my Facebook feed filled with ads from companies like this one, offering to enlighten me on the status of my chromosome tips.
The new biological ticker, the rDNA clock, makes its debut in the latest issue of Genome Research. Meng Wang and Bernardo Lemos, from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, term rDNA a "universally applicable marker of aging." Their article also is a brilliant example of how science is done, with a series of hypotheses and experiments, countering the oft-bellowed mantra that one can "believe in" climate change, evolution, or cell structure.
To continue reading, go to my DNA Science blog at Public Library of Science, where this post first appeared.