The murmur of old broken heartstrings.

Abstract

Although it has long been hypothesized that gene expression might become more variable or noisy during aging, direct evidence has been scarce so far. A new study reports detection, by PCR analysis of individual cells, of increased cell-to-cell variability in gene expression in aging mouse heart; moreover, a similar variability can be generated in cultured cells using oxidative stress (Bahar et al., 2006).