Roundworm

Well, what importance is that clinically? Well, a number of subsequent papers show that upper airway inflammation and asthma are caused by down-regulating these enzymes.

That if you take a little nematode called C. elegans and you grow that nematode in regular culture medium, it lives typically for 20 days.

If you grow it in a culture medium that contains enough beta-hydroxybutyrate, it lives 26% longer.

Now this nematode is a darling of the longevity research community because it only lives 20 days.

I'm originally from Turkey, but starting as an undergrad research scholar at the MRCLMB, the University of Cambridge, the UK, back to 2004.

And I participated in a study of the sensory ability of the nematode C. elegans, where I joined and learned about the neuron and neuroscience that time and what we discovered that the mechanism of how this animal, small animal, microscopic warmth.

integrates the signal from food to hypoxic stress to regulate its adaptive behavior.

That was fascinating.

Um, I was very lucky and they respected me, which is another point.

And those respect, I think it deserved because I was also respectful.

Um, but again, the other thing is the, the lab, which they initially discovered the C. elegans got the Nobel prize.

I was working the, in the Nobel prize lab.

But Dr. Oded Rakavi's lab is asking whether RNA can sometimes carry more than just temporary instructions.

They use C. elegans, these tiny, transparent worms, to study inheritance with unusual

precision.

And the strongest evidence comes from small RNAs.

Insulin-slash-IGF-1 signaling is one of the best-established molecular pathways regulating longevity across animal species.

In C. elegans, the gene DAF2 encodes an insulin-slash-IGF1 receptor, and reducing its activity can substantially extend lifespan.

However, most previous aging studies in this model have focused on hermaphrodites, leaving considerably less known about how males respond to interventions targeting the same pathway.

To investigate these sex-specific effects, the researchers used an auxin-inducible Degren system to selectively degrade the DAF2 receptor throughout the body or within particular tissues.

Median lifespan increased by 446%, compared with a 109% increase in hermaphrodites exposed to the same intervention.

The age at which 10% of the population remained alive reached 106 days in treated males, compared with 15 days in controls.

The authors described this as one of the largest lifespan extensions reported in C. elegans, or any animal, from a single intervention.

The effects also depended strongly on which tissue was targeted.