Early manifestations of replicative aging in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
Authors:Maksim I. Sorokin1,3, Dmitry A. Knorre2,3, and Fedor F. Severin2,3
doi: 10.15698/mic2014.01.122
Volume 1, pp. 37 to 42, published 06/01/2014.
1 Faculty of Bioengineering and Bioinformatics, Moscow State University, Vorobyevy Gory 1, Moscow, Russia
2 Belozersky Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology, Moscow State University, Vorobyevy Gory 1, Moscow, Russia
3 Institute of Mitoengineering, Moscow State University, Vorobyevy Gory 1, Moscow, Russia
Keywords:
yeast, aging, stress resistance, retrograde signaling.
Corresponding Author(s):
Conflict of interest statement:
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Please cite this article as:
Maksim I. Sorokin, Dmitry A. Knorre, and Fedor F. Severin (2014). Early manifestations of replicative aging in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Microbial Cell 1(1): 37-42.
© 2013 Sorokin et al. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, which allows readers to twist, transform, or build upon the article and then distribute the resulting work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
Abstract:
The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is successfully used as a model organism to find genes responsible for lifespan control of higher organisms. As functional decline of higher eukaryotes can start as early as one quarter of the average lifespan, we asked whether S. cerevisiae can be used to model this manifestation of aging. While the average replicative lifespan of S. cerevisiae mother cells ranges between 15 and 30 division cycles, we found that resistances to certain stresses start to decrease much earlier. Looking into the mechanism, we found that knockouts of genes responsible for mitochondria-to-nucleus (retrograde) signaling, RTG1 or RTG3, significantly decrease the resistance of cells that generated more than four daughters, but not of the younger ones. We also found that even young mother cells frequently contain mitochondria with heterogeneous transmembrane potential and that the percentage of such cells correlates with replicative age. Together, these facts suggest that retrograde signaling starts to malfunction in relatively young cells, leading to accumulation of heterogeneous mitochondria within one cell. The latter may further contribute to a decline in stress resistances.