Aging’s most obvious characteristic is the time dependent increase of an individual’s probability to die. This lifelong process is accompanied by a large number of molecular and physiological changes. Although numerous genes involved in aging have been identified in the past decades its leading factors have yet to be determined. To identify the very processes driving aging we have developed in the past years an assay to identify physiologically old individuals in a synchronized population of Drosophila melanogaster. Those individuals show an age-dependent increase of intestinal permeability followed by a high risk of death. Here we show that this physiological marker of aging is conserved in 3 invertebrate species Drosophila mojavensis, Drosophila virilis, Caenorhabditis elegans as well as in 1 vertebrate species Danio rerio. Our findings suggest that intestinal barrier dysfunction may be an important event in the aging process conserved across a broad range of species, thus raising the possibility that it may also be the case in Homo sapiens.
Aging's most obvious characteristic is the time dependent increase of an individual's probability to die. This lifelong process is accompanied by a large number of molecular and physiological changes. Although numerous genes involved in aging have been identified in the past decades its leading factors have yet to be determined. To identify the very processes driving aging we have developed in the past years an assay to identify physiologically old individuals in a synchronized population of Drosophila melanogaster. Those individuals show an age-dependent increase of intestinal permeability followed by a high risk of death. Here we show that this physiological marker of aging is conserved in 3 invertebrate species Drosophila mojavensis, Drosophila virilis, Caenorhabditis elegans as well as in 1 vertebrate species Danio rerio. Our findings suggest that intestinal barrier dysfunction may be an important event in the aging process conserved across a broad range of species, thus raising the possibility that it may also be the case in Homo sapiens.Based on the evolutionary links existing between species, it is common in biology to address mechanistic questions using model organisms. Organisms such as Drosophila melanogaster or Caenorhabditis elegans have been extensively used for deciphering genetic and molecular pathways in many biological processes, including aging. In fact, the first 'longevity gene' has been identified in C. elegans 1 , which led to the discovery of the insulin pathway as a major conserved regulator of aging in many species. Since then, many more genes, including evolutionary conserved ones, were shown as playing a role in determining longevity [2][3][4][5][6] . This finding of 'conserved master aging genes' was initially rather unexpected in the context of evolutionary theories of aging where aging is viewed as a highly polygenic trait resulting from the declining force of natural selection. Consequently, these results have been much discussed in terms of adaptive (or programmed) versus non-adaptive theories of aging 7-10 . Independently of this debate, it should be stressed that numerous genomic rearrangements and organism specificities that occurred during evolution might lead to the identification of mechanisms that cannot be transposed from one organism to another. For example, the complexification of insulin signaling pathway in mammals compared to ecdysozoans' might render pro-longevity genetic interventions deleterious or neutral when transposing longevity treatments identified in the latter organisms 11 . Thus, one critical step towards identifying the leading factors driving aging would be to switch from an all-genetic paradigm to a more physiological paradigm. Such a switch would be possible through identifying a sequence of physiological and/or molecular events occurring during normal aging-in contrast to pathological aging. The analysis of whether such physiological events could be causally related to the aging process as well as their evolutionary conservation would bring important ...
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