Each of us contains tens of billions of miles of DNA—enough for 100,000 trips to the moon and back if each strand were uncoiled and placed end to end.1798 How does our body prevent these precious ribbons of information from getting all twisted and tangled? Enzymes known as sirtuins keep our DNA neatly and nicely wrapped around spool-like proteins and, by doing so, silence whatever genes are in that stretch of DNA. The name SIRtuins stands for Silencing Information Regulator.
