Individual Change and the Biological Aging Process

From Santa Fe Institute Event Wiki

A brief overview of the biological theories of aging will be presented to orient participants with respect to the global thinking in biogerontology. This will be followed by a discussion of the need for a systems biology approach to aging based on the simple eukaryote, Saccharomyces cerevisiae (yeast). Several examples of non-linear behavior of this single-cell system during aging will be presented. In addition, an example of a feedback loop on top of another feedback loop that links mitochondria and nuclear genome stability in yeast longevity will be shown. A model of a biological aging system that is driven by random change will be discussed, and its application to yeast aging will be presented. It will be argued that there is deterministic information about aging contained within stochastic events that occur during the yeast life span.