{"doi":"10.3390/ijms241914858","title":"N6-Methyladenine Progressively Accumulates in Mitochondrial DNA during Aging","abstract":"N6-methyladenine (6mA) in the DNA is a conserved epigenetic mark with various cellular, physiological and developmental functions. Although the presence of 6mA was discovered a few years ago in the nuclear genome of distantly related animal taxa and just recently in mammalian mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), accumulating evidence at present seriously questions the presence of N6-adenine methylation in these genetic systems, attributing it to methodological errors. In this paper, we present a reliable, PCR-based method to determine accurately the relative 6mA levels in the mtDNA of Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster and dogs, and show that these levels gradually increase with age. Furthermore, daf-2(−)-mutant worms, which are defective for insulin/IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor) signaling and live twice as long as the wild type, display a half rate at which 6mA progressively accumulates in the mtDNA as compared to normal values. Together, these results suggest a fundamental role for mtDNA N6-adenine methylation in aging and reveal an efficient diagnostic technique to determine age using DNA.","journal":"International Journal of Molecular Sciences","year":2023,"id":340248,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":16,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9524,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1042620,"name":"Himani Sharma","orcid":"0000-0001-6947-9281","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1042619,"name":"Ferenc Bodnár","orcid":"0000-0001-9630-1315","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1075254,"name":"Maryam Aslam","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":753236,"name":"Tibor Kovács","orcid":"0000-0002-0632-9128","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1075255,"name":"Ákos Németh","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1042616,"name":"Bernadette Hotzi","orcid":"0000-0003-1433-6843","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":753238,"name":"Viktor Billes","orcid":"0000-0003-0030-6221","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1074608,"name":"Tímea Sigmond","orcid":"0000-0002-1985-428X","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1075256,"name":"Kitti Tátrai","orcid":null,"position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1074609,"name":"Balázs Egyed","orcid":"0000-0003-3960-2052","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1075257,"name":"Blanka Téglás-Huszár","orcid":null,"position":11,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":915406,"name":"Gitta Schlosser","orcid":"0000-0002-7637-7133","position":12,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":871131,"name":"Nikolaos Charmpilas","orcid":"0000-0002-8893-2827","position":13,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":436307,"name":"Christina Ploumi","orcid":"0000-0002-2389-5471","position":14,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1042623,"name":"András Perczel","orcid":"0000-0003-1252-6416","position":15,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":286101,"name":"Nektarios Tavernarakis","orcid":"0000-0002-5253-1466","position":16,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":753237,"name":"Tibor Vellai","orcid":"0000-0002-3520-2572","position":17,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1042615,"name":"Ádám Sturm","orcid":"0000-0002-9515-8761","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":44,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:10:54.145367Z","pmid":"37834309","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}