Vie de l'IBPC

Cellular aging – a side-product of life?

Anita Krisko

Mediterranean Institute for Life Sciences, Split, Croatia

            From the beginning of time, people have tried to understand and fight aging, and myths of eternal youth continue to pique our curiosity. Aging is a natural phenomenon that affects the entire physiology of an organism. It is also one of the most intriguing issues of modern biology as it occurs despite numerous complex pathways of maintenance and repair. As chronological age of an organism increases, a number of errors accumulate at different levels of biological organization. The tendency of errors to accumulate and cause downstream problems is met by numerous mechanisms that serve as protectors, correctors and cleaners of cell components. These mechanisms involve a variety of dedicated maintenance functions, including chaperones, reactive oxygen species scavenging enzymes, DNA damage response, etc. It follows that protection and maintenance failure detriments one or more cellular functions, which, in turn, may lead to aging and disease.

            Therefore, in my group we investigate aging as a process of progressive functional degeneracy of nearly all cellular functions due to diminishing protein activity, and decreased precision of protein interactions caused by accumulation of non-reparable protein damage. We are using the combination of state-of-art genomics, proteomics and biophysical methods to systematically address the role of the decline in cellular proteome structure and function in aging. More specifically, I will discuss the role of protein folding fidelity in the life span determination and the relationship between protein chaperones and mitochondrial function in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. In addition, the differential resistance of proteins to non-reparable damage will be discussed, as well as the potential to protect cellular proteins in vivo.

            Together, our results provide novel insight into the aging process in model organisms and pave the way for the application of the obtained results in higher organisms.