Eating Nothing is the Fountain of Youth???
I know this blog is about innate immunity, but since I work in an aging lab, it's something that mildly interests me. I ran across this paper where it was apparently found that by removing the food course of c. elegans, a round worm, they will actually have increased longevity.
I guess I should start by saying that c. elegans is a common model organism. It offers many of the same advantages that Drosophila do having a sequenced genome, being easy to manipulate and relatively short lived. From what I've read, since I actually know very little about c. elegans, they are cultured on agar plates, and are fed UV-killed bacterial culture. I should also mention that it is a well known phenomenon that putting animals on a calorically restricted diet extends lifespan. What is new here is that starving the animals completely also extends lifespan. I dont know about you, but I was skeptical.
Similar to the experiment in my last post, where exposing flies to bacteria extended lifespan only in a specific time window, starving worms extends lifespan optimally at certain ages. When worms are put on a normal diet, they live to a maximum age of about 42 days. However, when larvae are starved, the maximum lifespan increases a couple of days and when 2 day old adults are starved, the effect is maximised.
The next part of the paper was starving mutants to try and dissect the pathway through which lifespan is increased. The first mutant tested was a little off topic, but it was a long-lived mutant, and when it was starved, no increase in lifespan was seen. A series of other mutants were then tested, and it was found that the extension of lifespan during starvation is independent of the Insulin-IGF-signalling pathway, which is considered responsible for the effects of conventional caloric restriction.
Although the findings of this paper are pretty cool, I'm still a little skeptical as to how they were achieved. Their materials and methods are pretty skinny. I'd be interested to see if another lab can replicate these results.
I guess I should start by saying that c. elegans is a common model organism. It offers many of the same advantages that Drosophila do having a sequenced genome, being easy to manipulate and relatively short lived. From what I've read, since I actually know very little about c. elegans, they are cultured on agar plates, and are fed UV-killed bacterial culture. I should also mention that it is a well known phenomenon that putting animals on a calorically restricted diet extends lifespan. What is new here is that starving the animals completely also extends lifespan. I dont know about you, but I was skeptical.
Similar to the experiment in my last post, where exposing flies to bacteria extended lifespan only in a specific time window, starving worms extends lifespan optimally at certain ages. When worms are put on a normal diet, they live to a maximum age of about 42 days. However, when larvae are starved, the maximum lifespan increases a couple of days and when 2 day old adults are starved, the effect is maximised.
The next part of the paper was starving mutants to try and dissect the pathway through which lifespan is increased. The first mutant tested was a little off topic, but it was a long-lived mutant, and when it was starved, no increase in lifespan was seen. A series of other mutants were then tested, and it was found that the extension of lifespan during starvation is independent of the Insulin-IGF-signalling pathway, which is considered responsible for the effects of conventional caloric restriction.
Although the findings of this paper are pretty cool, I'm still a little skeptical as to how they were achieved. Their materials and methods are pretty skinny. I'd be interested to see if another lab can replicate these results.
posted by Sean at 5:00 PM
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