CRI Research Collaboratory seminar avec Michael Rera (CRI) Lundi 7 septembre de 11h30 à 12h3

Ageing is a complex process, broadly affecting living organisms in extremely various ways, ranging from the negligible senescence of some trees and arthropods, through the sudden post-reproduction death of salmon and desert organisms, to our human ageing with what has long been described as a time dependent exponential increase of the mortality risk.

Drosophila melanogaster and Mus musculus, the fruitfly and mouse, are two broadly used model organisms for studying ageing mostly because they show an apparent exponential increase of their mortality risk, same as in humans. Using the first model system, about 10 years ago I identified a physiological marker preceding death – fruitflies would trun blue when fed a non-toxic food dye. This simple visual cue allows us to identify individuals at a different stage of their life amongst a cohort of individuals and study aging and progress towards death.

For the past 10 years, we have used this tool to question our knowledge regarding ageing, showed the broad conservation of this end-of-life phenotype in different drosophila subspecies, nematodes, zebrafish and killifish as well as develop a novel mathematical model for ageing allowing the experimental quantification of various “ageing parameters”.

Upon joining the CRI, we aim at finalizing our validation of the model in mammals, showing how our model changes our understanding of ageing’s molecular drivers and better understand how ageing can be a driving force of evolution.

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