Bacteria as a New Model System for Aging Studies: Investigations Using Light Microscopy

Abstract

Aging—the decline in an individual's condition over time—is at the center of an active research field in medicine and biology. Some very basic questions have, however, remained unresolved, the most fundamental being: do all organisms age? Or are there organisms that would continue to live forever if not killed by external forces? For a long time it was believed that aging only affected organisms such as animals, plants, and fungi. Bacteria, in contrast, were assumed to be potentially immortal and until recently this assertion remained untested. We used phase-contrast microscopy (on an Olympus BX61) to follow individual bacterial cells over many divisions to prove that some bacteria show a distinction between an aging mother cell and a rejuvenated daughter, and that these bacteria thus age. This indicates that aging is a more fundamental property of organisms than was previously assumed. Bacteria can now be used as very simple model system for investigating why and how organisms age.