Aging investigated with the help of a worm

 Prof. Javier Apfeld
Prof. Javier Apfeld has had his recent collaborative efforts published in Nature. This article presents some interesting findings on aging in Caenorhabditis elegans and possible links to answer questions about aging in other organisms.

“…By collecting high-precision mortality statistics from large populations, we observe that interventions as diverse as changes in diet, temperature, exposure to oxidative stress, and disruption of genes including the heat shock factor hsf-1, the hypoxia-inducible factor hif-1, and the insulin/IGF-1 pathway components daf-2, age-1, and daf-16 all alter lifespan distributions by an apparent stretching or shrinking of time.  To produce such temporal scaling, each intervention must alter to the same extent throughout adult life all physiological determinants of the risk of death. Organismic ageing in Caenorhabditis elegans therefore appears to involve aspects of physiology that respond in concert to a diverse set of interventions.” – Nature Article by Nicholas Stroustrup, Winston E. Anthony, Zachary M. Nash, Vivek Gowda, Adam Gomez, Isaac F. López-Moyado, Javier Apfeld & Walter Fontana

Click here to read the article in Nature online: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature16550.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20160128&spMailingID=50563385&spUserID=MjA1NzIwNjA2MQS2&spJobID=843636789&spReportId=ODQzNjM2Nzg5S0