[...]... 1 Introduction Michael Breitenbach, Peter Laun, and S Michal Jazwinski Abstract Aging in yeast is now a well researched area with hundreds of new research and review papers appearing every year The chapters following in this book written by some of the leading experts in the field will give an overview of the most relevant areas of yeast aging The purpose of this chapter is to give the newcomer an introduction... organisms of aging where exact gene replacement resulting in “knock in strains can be routinely performed The other cell type where this can routinely be achieved at present, although with a much higher investment of time and money, is ES cells of the mouse In this way, any desired mutation can be introduced at will in haploid cells in the about 4800 non-essential yeast genes In the remaining about 1200... this introductory discussion of the two aging models of yeast and the in uence of caloric restriction on yeast aging, we may again ask the question as to the 10 M Breitenbach et al real driving force of organismic aging in higher organisms and what it possibly has to do with replicative and chronological aging of yeast The final word has not been said, but the aging processes seem to be multifactorial... clonal aging Comparison with “Hayflick Type Aging of Human Cells Leonard Hayflick discovered (Hayflick and Moorhead 1961) that human cells in culture (for instance, dermal fibroblasts or human umbilical vein endothelial cells, HUVEC) have a limited lifespan and undergo clonal aging resulting in death of all descendants of the primary cell The aging HUVEC display remarkable similarity to aging yeast mother... activating stem cells, will be in the center of aging research in the future The interaction of damage removal and asymmetric segregation of damage is a new and powerful paradigm in aging research Yeast molecular biology and genetics will supply a substantial contribution to the open questions of future aging research References Aguilaniu H, Gustafsson L, Rigoulet M, Nystrom T (2003) Asymmetric inheritance... cellular aging processes in humans but have little to do with each other in terms of the genes which are involved (Laun et al 2006) The main purpose of this Introduction is to present these two aging processes, to compare them with each other, and to evaluate them with regard to the aging processes in the human body for which they are claimed to be models Mother Cell-Specific (Replicative) Aging of Yeast. .. et al (eds.), Aging Research in Yeast, Subcellular Biochemistry 57, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2561-4_1, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V 2012 1 2 M Breitenbach et al methods and the many publicly available mutant and gene collections, including cDNA microarrays, whole genome screening procedures have become a powerful tool for yeast genetic research and have also been used for aging research However,... part of their life (for instance during winter in moderate climates!) are actually in non-growing (starving) conditions It should be kept in mind, though, that yeast cells in the wild are largely diploid and undergo sporulation on starvation, yielding the long lived dispersal form called the spore On the other hand, postmitotic human cells in grown-up individuals (neurons of the brain, myotubes of the... be modeled in yeast and an obvious example is development and cell differentiation, which exists in yeast, but is much more complex in higher multicellular organisms The questions which we are asking here are: are the cellular aging processes of yeast which are described in this book, relevant and similar in mechanism to the cellular aging processes observed in cultured higher cells and in higher organisms?... higher organisms? What can we learn from yeast aging that is relevant to understand the aging processes of higher organisms? Can this lead to interventions in the aging process of humans that improve the lifespan and health span of humans? In order to answer these questions, we must understand the molecular genetic pathways relevant to aging both in yeast and in higher organisms and we have to compare . Stress in Yeast Models of Aging 187 William C. Burhans and Martin Weinberger vii viii Contents 10 Yeast Aging and Apoptosis 207 Peter Laun, Sabrina Büttner,. easy to handle making yeast one of only two model organisms of aging where exact gene replacement resulting in “knock in strains can be routinely performed.