The budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model organism: possible implications for gerontological studies

Tomasz Bilinski,Renata Zadrag-Tecza,Aneta Bylak

doi:10.1007/s10522-017-9712-x

Abstract

Experimental gerontology is based on the fundamental assumption that the aging process has a universal character and that the mechanisms of aging are well-conserved among living things. The consequence of this assumption is the use of various organisms, including unicellular yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, as models in gerontology, and direct extrapolation of the conclusions drawn from the studies carried on these organisms to human beings. However, numerous arguments suggest that aging is not universal and its mechanisms are not conserved in a wide range of species. Instead, senescence can be treated as a side effect of the evolution of specific features for systematic group, unrelated to the passage of time. Hence, depending on the properties of the group, the senescence and proximal causes of death could have a diverse nature. We postulate that the selection of a model organism to explain the mechanism of human aging and human longevity should be preceded by the analysis of its potential to extrapolate the results to a wide group of organisms. Considering that gerontology is a human-oriented discipline and that aging involves complex, systemic changes affecting the entire organism, the object of experimental studies should be animals which are closest relatives of human beings in evolutionary terms, rather than lower organisms, which do not have sufficient complexity in terms of tissues and organ structures.

Highlights

Gerontology is a strongly human-oriented discipline that for many years has been attempting to find answers to several important questions, especially from the human being’s point of view, such as ‘‘Why do we age?’’ or ‘‘How long can we live?’’ Despite the sizeable body of knowledge collected over that time, these questions remain unanswered
They assumed that mechanisms of aging are well-conserved among living things and that conclusions drawn from studies carried out on the budding yeast may be extrapolated to human beings (Ganley et al 2012; Kaeberlein 2012; Teplyuk 2012)
Depending on the properties of the systematic group, the process known as senescence and the proximal causes of death have a diverse nature

Summary

Introduction

Gerontology is a strongly human-oriented discipline that for many years has been attempting to find answers to several important questions, especially from the human being’s point of view, such as ‘‘Why do we age?’’ or ‘‘How long can we live?’’ Despite the sizeable body of knowledge collected over that time, these questions remain unanswered. These studies, were based on the assumption that the age of an individual and ‘‘longevity’’ of the population should be expressed as the number of daughters produced by a single cell, rather than the length of life, as in the case of animals.

Results

Conclusion