We recently selected 3 long-lived mutant strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae by a lasting exposure to exogenous lithocholic acid. Each mutant strain can maintain the extended chronological lifespan after numerous passages in medium without lithocholic acid. In this study, we used these long-lived yeast mutants for empirical verification of evolutionary theories of aging. We provide evidence tha...

This study tests two evolutionary hypotheses on grandparental investments differentiated by the child's sex: the paternity uncertainty hypothesis and the Trivers-Willard hypothesis. Data are from two culturally different countries: the Dutch Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (n=2375) and the Chinese Anhui Survey (n=4026). In the Netherlands, grandparental investments are biased towards daughte...

This is a clearly deleterious process, which seems difficult to conciliate with natural selection, which predicts evolution towards increasing fitness. Historically, the first evolutionary explanation able to conciliate these two processes is known as the mutation accumulation theory (Medawar, 1952). According to this theory, in age-structured populations the force of selection decreases with i...

Senescence (aging) is defined as a decline in performance and fitness with advancing age. Senescence is a nearly universal feature of multicellular organisms, and understanding why it occurs is a long-standing problem in biology. Here we present a concise review of both evolutionary and mechanistic theories of aging. We describe the development of the general evolutionary theory, along with the...

Senescence is a nearly universal feature of multicellular organisms, and understanding why it occurs is a long-standing problem in biology. The two leading theories posit that aging is due to (i) pleiotropic genes with beneficial early-life effects but deleterious late-life effects ("antagonistic pleiotropy") or (ii) mutations with purely deleterious late-life effects ("mutation accumulation")....

high‐throughput chemical genetic screen of chemical compounds from several commercial libraries has revealed that lithocholic bile acid (LCA), and some other bile acids, can slow yeast chronological aging [1]. The robust geroprotective effect of exogenously added LCA is due to its ability to enter chronologically aging yeast cells, be sorted to both mitochondrial membranes and alter mitochondri...