I have a random question about telomeres

[BlackAmericanoNoSugar]

I'll preface this by saying that I know next to nothing about biology, virology, DNA or ageing, which will be obvious from the nature of my questions. Also, these are not particularly serious questions, just random musings from my bored brain.

In my head I'm writing a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi book. It will never, ever be written down but it keeps my mind happily occupied during the insomnia hours (usually 4am/5am to getting up time). I started the story in the fun, middle bit and then created the society and physical surroundings but now I need to set up the background to my story. I need to have a cause for people living longer but women having drastically reduced fertility leading to a much reduced world population.

What I thought was a genius geneticist, who wanted to be a rich, genius geneticist, had used a virus to alter DNA so that the telomeres decay more slowly. (Question 1, would you need to alter DNA for this, or can telomeres be affected directly by some other means?) People would live nearly double lifespan from the time that they are infected. He wants to earn money from it so the virus has to be low transmission (to be administered by injection and the patient kept in solitary until the virus as left the system) and also he doesn't want it passed on from one generation to the next. So my next question is would the altered DNA pass on from either women or men? My guess is that since ovums are created at the time that the baby girl is developing in the womb that a woman would pass on her original DNA and not the altered, whereas men are constantly making sperm so they would pass on the altered DNA. Is that right? Because I want my geneticist to include something in the virus to blight the women's ovums, but not be too worried about sperm. Although, my story would probably sort of work if men had reduced fertility too.

Ooh I have no idea OP but am bumping for you as I now feel invested in your apocalyptic vision!

Another bump for the late night crowd!

If you give them the new DNA as an adult it cannot be passed on. To pass on new DNA you must have modified an embroyo and then implanted that to make a child. New bridal DNA will enter human cells but as soon as new cells are made this DNA is wiped out. So maybe the effects last one or two months (check out gene therapy somatic and germ line).
I'm an undergrad biomedic so know a fair bit but I'm sure there will be others more qualified 😅

I'm pretty sure that there is someone on Mumsnet who knows this stuff, because there is always at least one Mumsnetter who knows even the most obscure stuff, but perhaps that person has rushed off to make a fortune through slowing down ageing by use of a virus to alter the telomeres.

So you wouldn't need to necessarily alter the DNA to do this. Telomere attrition occurs every time the cell divides. I believe as the DNA polymerase drops off early and honestly as telomeres aren't 100% vital the body doesn't really care (I'm on summer break rn so my biology is as good as usual 😂).
You wouldn't even necessarily need a virus. There are plenty of ways of bringing new DNA into an individual and have zero transmission rate. Find a non virulent, zero transmission vector. I think if you're going sci fi maybe do nano particles. So DNA (if it is DNA that is stopping the telomere attrition which would be believable) placed inside a particle that when injected would break down the nano particle packaging and potentially enter cells (if you have a good mode of action. So ideally you want a viral DNA particle with a way of attaching to cells and then entering cells.
On terms of reducing population it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to increase testosterone production in women to make them more infertile and decrease it in men resulting in decreased fertility of the population.
But as I said all this hassle and unless the stem cells are infected (which rn doesn't happen unless you modify and embroyo but maybe as it's sci-fi you could twist it so it can be done) the mutation will only last a matter of months.
If this character is money driven then it's perfect. Every two months people have to go in for a booster.
Hope this has somehow helped!

Also sorry for the poor spelling in places!

Sounds like a potential movie to me :-)

Who would you cast as your genius villain OP?

I think it's more of a never-to-be-made movie in my head DeRigeurMortis, but it sounds more intellectual to have an unwritten novel.

Thanks for that swanlife, that's really interesting. I would quite like it to be a virus that has a permanent result as I need it to go airborne during the trial stages and infect the entire world.

Basically I'm working backwards from the time my novel (or movie) is set. The origin of the apocalypse is really only a couple of pages to give a background to the story, the story would probably also work without an explanation of the cause. There are lots of sci-fi stories that just start with a different society without explaining how it happened, like Logan's Run.

The whole thing started with an idle thought about slavery, and how it was once acceptable, and we can't look back through history and judge people as 'bad' just because they owned slaves. So I wondered if it could ever become acceptable to have slavery in the future, a slavery that society approved of. I created a society that's pretty utopian considering, a few dark sides and slight danger of complete annihilation, but don't all societies have that? People age normally until puberty and then age at around half normal rate and live much longer, but fertility is very low. Below a latitude of 48.5 degrees girls become infertile before reaching puberty, the further from the equator the longer a woman is fertile, but even up in Iceland the oldest a woman can get pregnant is late 20s. After the 'event' (which I would like to be a mutated virus) the population initially didn't change much because people lived a bit longer, but by the time of my novel the world's population is a tiny fraction of what it once was and concentrated above 50 degrees North/South (not that there is very much at that latitude in the Southern hemisphere). It was a slow and rather dull apocalypse, but it did benefit flora and fauna in the now unpopulated areas of Earth and global warming isn't a worry any more.

The good thing is that there are 'nanites', microscopic and programmable. Nanites were originally developed to travel the ocean in huge clumps and gather waste plastic. They can behave like individuals or as a unit, the more there are the more processing power there is. They can stretch out tendrils from the main clump to gather in ocean plastic and they can form propellors to move the plastic to waste disposal areas. They can now do lots of things, like monitor human health from inside the body or form structures. Need an occasional table but don't want it blocking up a room? Nanite table, will deconstruct when not needed. There is also Hub, an artificial intelligence. Hub holds all the information and does all the dull administrative things like waste recycling or fixing pot holes. Every country has their own version of Hub and friendly countries share selected information with the Hubs of other countries. Everyone in my country (Ireland) has free access to Hub and for the most part they use it in the way that we use the internet now, asking for information and communicating with others.

There are some dark sides. In Ireland, and other north European countries, children are precious, they are cosseted, protected and given every educational advantage. Girls understand the populations problems and are treated as heroes if they have children, but aren't forced to. On average they have two births per girl before they become infertile despite being at a relatively low latitude. In America, however, all the rich men moved to Alaska and bought themselves teenage girls to procreate with. I'm pretty sure that none of those men had read The Handmaid's Tale, but that's what they ended up with although without the religious nonsense, women as breeding livestock. Unsurprisingly their birth rate is not good, girls try to hide themselves until they are too old or try to escape to Canada. There is a worry that they will try to steal teenage girls from other countries, either by individual kidnappings or by invading the country. Also Russia went dark a few years after the 'event' and who the fuck knows whether they are just keeping themselves to themselves or planning world domination.

The idea of protecting telomeres to reduce cell senescence and overcome ageing isn’t a new one - the problem is that the most obvious way of doing this (reactivating the enzyme telomerase, which restores telomeres) is one of the things cancer cells do to enable them to keep dividing uncontrollably. So the likelihood is that if you enable telomeres to decay more slowly, you also predispose the person to cancer.

I forgot to explain the 'slavery' bit. Basically in such a small population there isn't a need for a prison system, and anyway nobody wants to be a prison warden. So for serious crimes, like physical violence against another person, interfering with safety systems or trying to hack Hub, offenders are sent into exile. They get to choose their location from a limited list in the unpopulated area and whether they are alone or with other people, but they can never leave that location. For minor crimes like graffiti or anti-social behaviour, usually committed by disaffected young people, there is 'slavery' which is more like very strict foster care but called slavery to emphasise the punishment element. The young person is owned by a responsible member of society whom the slave must address as 'owner'. They have black nanite bands on their upper arm, forearm and wrists which signify that they are slaves and can be used as restraints. The slave has no access to Hub (which is an even more severe shock than cutting your DC off from X-Box) and every aspect of the slave's life is controlled by their owner, including when they sleep, who they communicate with, what they eat, what work they do etc. Slavery normally lasts 18 months to five years depending on the crime. While it's presented as punishment for the slave it's actually a means of breaking them away from their previous habits and trying to encourage them in a new direction by finding a career that they would enjoy, so the owners are very carefully chosen. It has a far higher success rate than any current juvenile detention system.

My story is centred on a young woman who is a very successful business advisor because of her natural ability to recognise patterns. She has had excellent success with slaves who are angry, defiant teenagers and this story is about her taking on four slaves at once, all in their twenties so older than her usual slaves and all different personalities.