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Caenorhabditis elegans

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A free-living soil nematode about one millimetre long, with a two-to-three-week lifespan, a fixed somatic cell count of 959 in the hermaphrodite, a fully mapped cell lineage and a fully mapped nervous system. Those properties made it the organism in which ageing first became a tractable genetics problem: Michael Klass isolated long-lived mutants in the 1980s, Thomas Johnson and David Friedman identified age-1 in 1988, and Cynthia Kenyon's laboratory showed in 1993 that mutating daf-2, the insulin/IGF-1 receptor homologue, more than doubles lifespan provided the transcription factor daf-16 remains functional. The pathway is conserved into mammals, which is why the result mattered. What does not transfer is the context: a post-mitotic adult worm with no cancer, no cardiovascular system and no adaptive immunity is a model of some of ageing, not of ageing.

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    Assembled narrative · 1

    Assembled from 9 blocks · 1 evidence · 7 related

    1. Story
    2. A free-living soil nematode about one millimetre long, with a two-to-three-week lifespan, a fixed somatic cell count of 959 in the hermaphrodite, a fully mapped cell lineage and a fully mapped nervous system. Those properties made it the organism in which ageing first became a tractable genetics problem: Michael Klass isolated long-lived mutants in the 1980s, Thomas Johnson and David Friedman identified age-1 in 1988, and Cynthia Kenyon's laboratory showed in 1993 that mutating daf-2, the insulin/IGF-1 receptor homologue, more than doubles lifespan provided the transcription factor daf-16 remains functional. The pathway is conserved into mammals, which is why the result mattered. What does not transfer is the context: a post-mitotic adult worm with no cancer, no cardiovascular system and no adaptive immunity is a model of some of ageing, not of ageing.
    3. Knowledge
    4. Caenorhabditis elegans
    5. Connections
    6. Model organism lifespan research
    7. A single-gene mutation doubles nematode lifespan
    8. Evidence
    9. Supports the daf-2 lifespan doubling and its dependence on daf-16. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session.
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