In a recent article in Cell Metabolism, Piper, Partridge, Raubenheimer and Simpson report that Dietary restriction (DR) and mutations in nutrient signaling pathways can extend healthy life span in diverse organisms.  Studying the interaction between these interventions should reveal mechanisms of aging, but has yielded some apparently contradictory results.  A multidimensional representation of nutrition, called [...]

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Steve Austad’s paper in Journal of Comparative Pathology (PubMed), Methusaleh’s Zoo: How Nature provides us with Clues for Extending Human Health Span, promotes the idea that “exceptionally long-lived organisms have important roles to play in our future understanding of the causal mechanisms and modulation of ageing.” Austad writes that most of what is known about [...]

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The new gene discovered in mouse (Mus musculus), Rps23r1, decrease levels of toxic proteins that are linked to the formation plaques and tangles in the brains of Alzheimers disease patients. Published today in Neuron and the result of a worldwide collaboration of seven institutions, the research identifies the new gene and demonstrates how it reduces [...]

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In a controversial study published July 10, 2009 in Science (Science 325:201), researchers report that feeding rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) a diet that is 30% less calories than that of the control group results in lifespan extension. Rhesus monkeys live, on average, 27 years in captivity. Currently, in this 20 year long study, half of the [...]

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The news press (Wall Street Journal, New York Times) and blogs (WSJ’s Health Blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science) are all abuzz about Streptomyces hygroscopicus, a soil bacterium that secretes rapamycin. First discovered on Easter Island, rapamycin is an immune suppressant and an anticancer drug. But the reason people are talking about it today is because [...]

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The lifespan of fruit-feeding butterfies (Bicyclus anynana) is unusually long and is influenced by the animal’s food source (Molleman et al. 2008 Ecol Entomol. 33:429). A recent article in Experimental Gerontology shows that for this species dietary restriction did not result in greater longevity. These experiments were performed on males rather than females, an uncommon [...]

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A recent article in Nature suggests a protein involved in a conserved biochemical (ubiquitination) pathway is important for the increase in lifespan due to dietary restriction using the model organism, Caenorhabditis elegans. According to the authors: “Our study uncovers for the first time, to our knowledge, a role of the ubiquitin pathway in longevity in [...]

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A recent article in FASEB Journal shines some light on why bats live far longer than is predicted based on their size. Compared to mice, two species of bats — Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) cave myotis bats (Myotis velifer) — are more resistant to protein oxidation after exposure to oxidative stress. The FASEB Journal. [...]

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A recent review article by Jan Vijg and Judith Campisi entitled “Puzzles, promises and a cure for ageing” in Nature discusses the current state of research as related to human senescence, including the relevance of models systems for studying aging, pharmacological intervention and the authors’ view of promising future research directions.

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