In contrast, overall body size reduction, stem cell dysfunction and organ failure are hallmarks of the elderly. However, major obstacles for the clinical application of bacteriophages are the perception of viruses as ‘enemies of life’ , the lack of a specific frame for phage therapy in the current Medicinal Product Regulation and the absence of welldefined and safe bacteriophage preparations. Similarly, mice showing growth retardation and premature aging phenotypes also have decreased numbers of functional stem cells within tissues. Together, these findings suggest that occurrence of reduced organismal size and tissue dysfunction are likely linked to the exhaustion of functional stem cell pools, in agreement with a “rate-of-living” theory of aging specifically acting on stem cells. Telomere shortening has been shown to affect both organismal size and stem cell functionality in the context of telomerase-deficient mice. It is well established that nutrition can affect organismal lifespan. Caloric restriction is one of the most extensively studied feeding regimes shown to influence lifespan. Since the first report by McCay et al that restricting food intake of rats markedly extended their mean and maximal SAR131675 lifespan CR has been proven to be a robust feeding regime for lifespan extension in a wide range of model organisms including yeast. We have reported previously that changes in nutrition during fetal or early postnatal life alone are sufficient to have marked effects on lifespan in rats and mice. Offspring born to normally fed dams but suckled by protein restricted dams grew slowly during lactation and exhibited significantly longer lifespan when fed ad libitum on standard chow. Conversely offspring born to protein restricted dams but suckled by normally fed dams were smaller at birth, showed rapid catch-up growth and had a reduced longevity when fed ad libitum on standard chow. These findings demonstrate that nutrition during critical periods of development has a major impact on longevity. These findings are consistent with the developmental origins of health and disease hypothesis which suggests that the pre- and postnatal environment may program health/disease outcomes in adult life. Telomeres are ribonucleoprotein complexes at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes that have an essential role in protecting chromosome ends for DNA repair and degrading activities. Different groups reported recently their approaches to map probe sequences of Affymetrix microarrays to transcript sequences. Some of these mention transcript-specific analysis as a possible application, however, a confirmation of a predicted transcript expression by independent means such as real-time RT-PCR has not yet been reported. Dai et al. aligned probe sequences of several microarrays to transcript sequences from different databases and derived “transcript-specific” probe sets. However, as the authors noted, this implies redundancies in related probe set definitions, such as shared probes among different transcripts from the same gene.