Related papers: Implications of Aging in Bacteria
Biological evolution continuously refines the design of species, resulting in highly optimised organisms over hundreds of millennia. Intuitively, we expect that random changes-evolution's primary mechanism-are more likely to be harmful than…
Recent studies have shown that even in the absence of extrinsic stress, the morphologically symmetrically dividing model bacteria Escherichia coli do not generate offspring with equal reproductive fitness. Instead, daughter cells exhibit…
Cell division times in microbial populations display significant fluctuations, that impact the population growth rate in a non-trivial way. If fluctuations are uncorrelated among different cells, the population growth rate is predicted by…
Metabolic energy consumption has long been thought to play a major role in the aging process ({\it 1}). Across species, a gram of tissue on average expends about the same amount of energy during life-span ({\it 2}). Energy restriction has…
Many theories have been proposed to answer two questions on aging: "Why do we age?" and "How do we age?" Among them, evolutionary theories are proposed to interpret the evolutionary advantage of aging, and "saving resources for group…
Despite major environmental and genetic differences, microbial metabolic networks are known to generate consistent physiological outcomes across vastly different organisms. This remarkable robustness suggests that, at least in bacteria,…
Aging is a fundamental aspect of living systems that undergo a progressive deterioration of physiological function with age and an increase of vulnerability to disease and death. Living systems, known as complex systems, require complexity…
The evolutionary biology of aging is fundamental to understanding the mechanisms of aging and how to develop anti-aging treatments. Thus far most evolutionary theory concerns the genetics of aging with limited physiological integration.…
At any moment in time, evolution is faced with a formidable challenge: refining the already highly optimised design of biological species, a feat accomplished through all preceding generations. In such a scenario, the impact of random…
Aging is thought to be a consequence of intrinsic breakdowns in how genetic information is processed. But mounting experimental evidence suggests that aging can be slowed. To help resolve this mystery, I derive a mortality equation which…
The question of why we age is a fundamental one. It is about who we are, and it also might have critical practical aspects as we try to find ways to age slower. Or to not age at all. Different reasons point at distinct strategies for the…
Since the seminal work of Powell, the relationships between the population growth rate, the probability distributions of generation time, and the distribution of cell age have been known for the bacterial population in a steady state of…
The evolutionary origins of ageing and age-associated diseases continue to pose a fundamental question in biology. This study is concerned with a recently proposed framework, which conceptualises development and ageing as a continuous…
Biological aging is characterized by an age-dependent increase in the probability of death and by a decrease in the reproductive capacity. Individual age-dependent rates of survival and reproduction have a strong impact on population…
Models of many-species ecosystems, such as the Lotka-Volterra and replicator equations, suggest that these systems generically exhibit near-extinction processes, where population sizes go very close to zero for some time before rebounding,…
The mortality rate of many complex multicellular organisms increase with age, which suggests that net aging damage is accumulative, despite remodeling processes. But how exactly do little mishaps in the cellular level accumulate and spread…
Although species longevity is subject to a diverse range of selective forces, the mortality curves of a wide variety of organisms are rather similar. We argue that aging and its universal characteristics may have evolved by means of a…
Bacterial populations in natural conditions are expected to experience stochastic environmental fluctuations, and in addition, environments are affected by bacterial activities since they consume substrates and excrete various chemicals. We…
Based on the study of cellular aging using the single-cell model organism of budding yeast and corroborated by other studies, we propose the Emergent Aging Model (EAM). EAM hypothesizes that aging is an emergent property of complex…
It is now increasingly realized that the underlying mechanism which governs aging (ageing) is a complex interplay of genetic regulation and damage-accumulation. "Aging as a result of accumulation of 'faults' on cellular and molecular…