Abstract
Research on longevity and healthy aging promises to increase our lifespan and decrease the burden of degenerative diseases with important social and economic effects. Many aging theories have been proposed, and important aging pathways have been discovered. Model organisms have had a crucial role in this process because of their short lifespan, cheap maintenance, and manipulation possibilities. Yeasts, worms, fruit flies, or mammalian models such as mice, monkeys, and recently, dogs, have helped shed light on aging processes. Genes and molecular mechanisms that were found to be critical in simple eukaryotic cells and species have been confirmed in humans mainly by the functional analysis of mammalian orthologues. Here, we review conserved aging mechanisms discovered in different model systems that are implicated in human longevity as well and that could be the target of anti-aging interventions in human.
Highlights
Aging is considered a natural and unavoidable “side effect” of life in spite of the observation that life span can vary greatly between species and individuals
Studies carried out by Jimenez et al suggest that large breed dogs may have higher glycolytic rates, and an increased DNA mutation rate, which could be responsible for their decreased life span compared with small breed dogs, despite reactive oxygen species (ROS) production showing no differences across size and age classes [116]
Epidemiology, one of the most used approaches to investigate humans, is the branch of science that tries to count how often a certain pathology occurs in different population groups, hopefully identifying the risk or protective factors against certain pathologies
Summary
Aging is considered a natural and unavoidable “side effect” of life in spite of the observation that life span can vary greatly between species and individuals. Many mutations that are capable of increasing the life span of different model systems confirmed this prediction, but the existence of long-lived mutants, such as the yeast Ras or the C. elegans daf-2 that grow and reproduce at a normal rate [2], suggests that extended life doesn’t imply a reproductive or growth rate fitness cost. These observation are made in laboratory conditions; we cannot exclude that these mutants could show a reduced fitness, but only in the wild. We will describe below the genes and pathways discovered thanks to these organisms that have shed light on possible aging mechanisms in humans
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