Eventually, aging comes for us all — but new evidence suggests that in key ways, it may be a contagious condition.

In a provocative new study published in the journal Metabolism, scientists from South Korea and the United States found, while doing studies on human cells and with mice, that injecting the DNA messenger protein HMGB1 from an older individual can result in processes that very much look like aging.

Though it typically lives within cell nuclei and "organizes" DNA, HMGB1 gets released when its home cell starts to age or get stressed, causing the cell to stop dividing and start deteriorating in a process known as senescence. Once it's outside of its natural habitat, the protein acts very differently, and can change forms depending on how much oxygen it's exposed to — and when it

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