Barbara’s first first-author paper! Congrats! Fantastic effort by Barbara and Johannes to describe replicative ageing in yeast by developing comperhensive single cell and whole population level model deciphering phenomenas like rejuvenation and healtspan.
We investigate how damage repair and retention together can promote rejuvenation and at the same time ensure low damage levels in mother cells, reflected in longer health spans. We developed a dynamic model for damage accumulation over successive divisions in individual cells as part of a dynamically growing cell lineage. With detailed knowledge about single-cell dynamics and relationships between all cells in the lineage, we can infer how individual damage repair and retention strategies affect the propagation of damage in the population. We show that damage retention lowers damage levels in the population by reducing the variability across the lineage, and results in larger population sizes. Repairing damage efficiently in early life, as opposed to investing in repair when damage has already accumulated, counteracts accelerated ageing caused by damage retention. It prolongs the health span of individual cells which are moreover less prone to stress. In combination, damage retention and early investment in repair are beneficial for healthy ageing in yeast cell populations.
The paper is avaliable at: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008314