Salguero-Gómez Roberto, Shefferson Richard P, Hutchings Michael J
Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research Konrad-Zuße straße 1, 18057, Rostock, Germany ; Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, University of Queensland Goddard Building #8, St Lucia, Qld, 4072, Australia.
J Ecol. 2013 May;101(3):545-554. doi: 10.1111/1365-2745.12089. Epub 2013 Apr 24.
Senescence, the physiological decline that results in decreasing survival and/or reproduction with age, remains one of the most perplexing topics in biology. Most theories explaining the evolution of senescence (i.e. antagonistic pleiotropy, accumulation of mutations, disposable soma) were developed decades ago. Even though these theories have implicitly focused on unitary animals, they have also been used as the foundation from which the universality of senescence across the tree of life is assumed. Surprisingly, little is known about the general patterns, causes and consequences of whole-individual senescence in the plant kingdom. There are important differences between plants and most animals, including modular architecture, the absence of early determination of cell lines between the soma and gametes, and cellular division that does not always shorten telomere length. These characteristics violate the basic assumptions of the classical theories of senescence and therefore call the generality of senescence theories into question. This Special Feature contributes to the field of whole-individual plant senescence with five research articles addressing topics ranging from physiology to demographic modelling and comparative analyses. These articles critically examine the basic assumptions of senescence theories such as age-specific gene action, the evolution of senescence regardless of the organism's architecture and environmental filtering, and the role of abiotic agents on mortality trajectories. . Understanding the conditions under which senescence has evolved is of general importance across biology, ecology, evolution, conservation biology, medicine, gerontology, law and social sciences. The question ' naturally calls for an evolutionary perspective. Senescence is a puzzling phenomenon, and new insights will be gained by uniting methods, theories and observations from formal demography, animal demography and plant population ecology. Plants are more amenable than animals to experiments investigating senescence, and there is a wealth of published plant demographic data that enable interpretation of experimental results in the context of their full life cycles. It is time to make plants count in the field of senescence.
衰老，即随着年龄增长导致生存和/或繁殖能力下降的生理衰退现象，仍然是生物学中最令人困惑的话题之一。大多数解释衰老进化的理论（即拮抗多效性、突变积累、可抛弃体细胞理论）是几十年前提出的。尽管这些理论隐含地聚焦于单一动物，但它们也被用作假定衰老在生命之树上具有普遍性的基础。令人惊讶的是，对于植物界个体整体衰老的一般模式、原因和后果，我们知之甚少。植物与大多数动物之间存在重要差异，包括模块化结构、体细胞和配子之间不存在细胞系的早期确定，以及细胞分裂并不总是缩短端粒长度。这些特征违背了衰老经典理论的基本假设，因此对衰老理论的普遍性提出了质疑。本专题通过五篇研究文章为植物个体整体衰老领域做出了贡献，这些文章涉及从生理学、人口统计学建模到比较分析等多个主题。这些文章批判性地审视了衰老理论的基本假设，如年龄特异性基因作用、不考虑生物体结构和环境筛选的衰老进化，以及非生物因素在死亡轨迹中的作用。理解衰老进化所依据的条件在生物学、生态学、进化、保护生物学、医学、老年学、法律和社会科学等领域都具有普遍重要性。这个问题“自然需要一个进化的视角。衰老是一个令人困惑的现象，通过整合形式人口统计学、动物人口统计学和植物种群生态学的方法、理论和观察结果，将获得新的见解。植物比动物更适合进行衰老研究实验，并且有大量已发表的植物人口统计学数据，能够在其完整生命周期的背景下解释实验结果。是时候让植物在衰老领域发挥作用了。
