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COMPLEX TIME: Adaptation, Aging, & Arrow of Time

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Aging in Single-celled Organisms: from Bacteria to the Whole Tree of Life/MatteoOsella

From Complex Time

Notes by user Matteo Osella (Univ. Turin) for Aging in Single-celled Organisms: from Bacteria to the Whole Tree of Life

Post-meeting Reflection

1+ paragraphs on any combination of the following:

  • Presentation highlights
  • Open questions that came up
  • How your perspective changed
  • Impact on your own work
  • e.g. the discussion on [A] that we are having reminds me of [B] conference/[C] initiative/[D] funding call-for-proposal/[E] research group

- General disagreement on the definitions of aging and senescence. It does not seem a purely semantic problem, but reveals the lack of universally accepted essential conditions to define the aging process.

Example: Role of asymmetry (necessary condition or not) in the cellular division process for the emergence of aging.

- Discussion on the more appropriate measure of time to observe aging of living things.... The intrinsic timescale of different organisms (for example doubling time in fast-growing conditions) and the timescale fixed by the environment (e.g. feast and famine cycles) should be taken into account.

[interesting parallel with the approximately constant lifespan of mammals if measured in heart beats shown by G.West]

- In several different systems the hazard rate (for cell division or for death) shows an exponential increase followed by a plateu (e.g. in mortality rate in E.coli shown by Uli and from Lindner group) . Different theoretical models can reproduce such a trend. Is there a way to do model selection?

- Need for measurements of metabolic rate in bacteria in order to build a complete phenomenological theory of resource partitioning and its relations with growth and mass. An extension of existing theories built on data based on balanced exponential growth probably need to include survival and the cost of maintenance...

Reference material notes

Some examples:

  • Here is [A] database on [B] that I pull data from to do [C] analysis that might be of interest to this group (insert link).
  • Here is a free tool for calculating [ABC] (insert link)
  • This painting/sculpture/forms of artwork is emblematic to our discussion on [X]!
  • Schwartz et al. 2017 offers a review on [ABC] migration as relate to climatic factors (add the reference as well).

Reference Materials

Title Author name Source name Year Citation count From Scopus. Refreshed every 5 days. Page views Related file
Aging, mortality, and the fast growth trade-off of Schizosaccharomyces pombe Hidenori Nakaoka, Yuichi Wakamoto PLoS Biology 2017 0 6