Felker Daniel P, Robbins Christine E, McCormick Mark A
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, School of Medicine, University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA.
Autophagy Inflammation and Metabolism Center of Biomedical Research Excellence.
Transl Med Aging. 2020;4:1-10. Epub 2019 Dec 7.
Aging is a fundamental biological process that is still not fully understood. As many of the most significant human diseases have aging as their greatest risk factor, a better understanding of aging potentially has enormous practical implications in treating these diseases. The nematode is an exceptionally useful genetic model organism that had been used with great success to shed light on many genes and pathways that are involved in aging. Many of these pathways and mechanisms have been shown to be conserved through mammals. The standard methods for assaying survival in to measure changes in lifespan are tedious and time consuming. This limits the throughput and productivity of aging researchers. In recent years, many inroads have been made into automating various facets of the collection and analysis of lifespan experimental data. The advances described in this review all work to ameliorate some of the hurdles that come with manual worm lifespan scoring, by automating or eliminating some of the most time consuming aspects of the assay. By greatly increasing the throughput of lifespan assays, these methods will enable types of experiments (e.g., drug library screens) whose scale is currently impractical. These methods have already proved exceptionally useful, and some of them are likely to be the predecessors of even more refined methods that could lead to breakthroughs in the ability to study lifespan in . This could in turn potentially revolutionize our understanding of the basic biology of aging, and one day lead to treatments that could offset or delay age-related diseases in humans.
衰老乃一尚未被完全理解的基本生物学过程。鉴于许多最为严重的人类疾病都将衰老视为最大风险因素，故而更好地理解衰老对于治疗这些疾病可能具有巨大的实际意义。线虫是一种极为有用的遗传模式生物，已被成功用于阐明许多与衰老相关的基因和通路。其中许多通路和机制在哺乳动物中已被证明具有保守性。用于测定线虫寿命变化以衡量存活情况的标准方法既繁琐又耗时。这限制了线虫衰老研究人员的通量和生产力。近年来，在使寿命实验数据的收集和分析的各个方面实现自动化方面已取得诸多进展。本综述中所描述的进展均致力于通过自动化或消除该测定中一些最耗时的方面，来缓解手动对线虫寿命评分所带来的一些障碍。通过大幅提高寿命测定的通量，这些方法将能够开展目前规模尚不可行的各类实验（例如药物文库筛选）。这些方法已证明极为有用，其中一些可能会成为更为精细方法的前身，这些更精细的方法有望在研究线虫寿命的能力上取得突破。这反过来可能会彻底改变我们对衰老基本生物学的理解，并终有一天带来能够抵消或延缓人类与年龄相关疾病的治疗方法。
