Santa Fe Institute Collaboration Platform

COMPLEX TIME: Adaptation, Aging, & Arrow of Time

Get Involved!
Contact: Caitlin Lorraine McShea, Program Manager, cmcshea@santafe.edu

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

From Complex Time

Notes by user Owen Jones (University of Southern Denmark) 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

This has been an inspiring meeting. Fantastic to hear diverse ways of studying and thinking about aging/senescence, and how we can measure and follow fates of cells in lab context.

Nomenclature differences among fields can cause some confusion. e.g. aging vs. senescence. In my subfield - senescence can be be positive (deterioration with age), negligible (stasis with age) or negative (improvement with age). The term "aging" is therefore just the passage of time. (Based on work of Medawar, and more recently Vaupel and colleagues).

One major goal should be to be able to generalise understanding of aging/senescence across organisms as diverse as E. coli, TB, mice, humans, plants and even colonial organisms. We will undoubtedly need to scale data for different taxa (or different environmental conditions within species) to make them comparable. In this context I was especially inspired by Chris Kempes' work and Geoffery West's talk showing striking invariants across really diverse species. How will these scaling rules be across groups e.g. single celled - metazoans - colonial.

Other questions that emerged.

- Is resilience to perturbation (homeostasis) a useful marker of senescence?

- Asymmetry in cell division - isn't asymmetry inevitable?

- Is complexity of the organism (e.g. differentiated tissues/celltypes) important to aging trajectory? e.g. does it make homeostasis harder?

- Is senescence a spandrel? Can it be adaptive?

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).

Here is the database on plant population dynamics I mentioned in my talk: www.compadre-db.org [1] The database is called the "COMPADRE Plant Matrix Model database".

There is a sister database called "COMADRE" for animals (same web address).

Reference Materials

Title Author name Source name Year Citation count From Scopus. Refreshed every 5 days. Page views Related file
Diversity of ageing across the tree of life Owen R. Jones, Alexander Scheuerlein, Roberto Salguero-Gómez, Carlo Giovanni Camarda, Ralf Schaible, Brenda B. Casper, Johan P. Dahlgren, Johan Ehrlén, María B. García, Eric S. Menges, Pedro F. Quintana-Ascencio, Hal Caswell, Annette Baudisch, James W. Vaupel Nature 2014 0 5