Lateral view of bdelloidea, a rotifer. These tiny organisms are naturally resistant to ageing and dying, researchers able to take them from their natural marine environments to 'die' before being 'resurrected' when immersed in water again.
Credit: Wikimedia
LYONS: Every day our life expectancy rises by six hours, and babies born today are expected to live to at least 100 years on average, experts have reported, with hopes to gain clues about rejuvenation from organisms that are naturally resistant to aging and dying.
Continuously rising life expectancy has come as surprise: the UN had predicted that by the 1980s, we would hit a ceiling, but our maximum life expectancy has not yet been reached, and no-one knows when a maximum will be reached, if ever.
“Increasing life expectancy is probably the biggest threat facing humanity around the globe, bigger even than climate change,” said Thomas Kirkwood, professor at the Institute for Ageing Health at Newcastle University, UK, at Biovision, the 7th World Life Sciences Forum in Lyon, France.
Investing in repair and maintenance
But François Taddei, research director of the Evolutionary Systems Biology team at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM), said that “rising life expectancy is good news”, although we do not know yet why this is happening or whether it will be continuing, as genes and environment only partly explain ageing.
“There is something we’re missing and we have to understand,” said Taddei.
Taddei’s research is based on ‘retirement homes for bacteria’ which use tiny nano-chambers to separate individual bacteria from their offspring, found that even common bacteria like Escheriria coli age and die.
“Each nano-chamber is a private room for a bacterium, with a surveillance camera - it’s like Big Brother,” he said. His research showed that bacteria accumulated cellular damage and that those that invested more in repair and maintenance lived longer.
Watching organisms be 'resurrected'
But not everyone is happy to sit and wait for the world to become populated with older people. Miroslav Radman, a professor of cell biology at the Medical School of Rene Descartes University in Paris said that as we advance in our understanding of what causes aging, “rejuvenation should become possible”.
Radman presented some of his group’s findings on research on organisms that are naturally extremely resistant to aging and dying. Bdelloid rotifers are small invertebrates that are highly resistant to desiccation and radiation.
They can be taken out of their natural marine environments and “dropped into dust” for years, then 'resurrected' when immersed in water again, Radman said. They can also survived without sex for some 80 million years.
