Aging in bacteria

 The evolutionary Demography research group at Freie Universitat Berlin studied the differences in the aging process in different samples of E. coli across more than 100 generations, with genetically identical bacteria and identical environment. They discovered a difference in the aging process of these bacteria and found that the aging process from mother to daughter cell. The study found a specific pole at the end of the rod shaped bacteria that got darker as the bacteria aged, meaning that the organism produced less proteins over time, but this behavior did not necessarily take place in the daughter cells, or the cells surrounding it in the same environment, meaning that these E. coli groups have different individualistic aging processes.

An article for the American Society for Microbiology pivots this topic in a different direction, showing that E. coli age in a different way by losing symmetry during multiple instances of binary fission. Showing that parent cells have a tendency to perform the essential reproductive functions over many different generations in comparison to the daughter cells. Eventually, leading for different kinds of mutations that make them die off, but also increasing population fitness.

I think that understanding the process of aging in bacteria is tremendously important when we attempt to understand the way that microbial communities and bacterial communities exist and distribute themselves throughout different periods of time. Do communities that exist in semiaquatic systems age and disappear because of the way they function? Just some thoughts that come into my head. I don’t know if understanding bacterial aging is as helpful to understanding human aging since they are functionally different, understanding stress factors and the way that both kinds of organisms are affected by it is a different kind of question. Overall nice findings and it is very interesting to know that there are scientists studying and reproducing these groundbreaking experiments with simple set ups but objective observations.

https://asm.org/articles/2024/september/do-bacteria-age

https://phys.org/news/2024-11-unexpected-differences-genetically-identical-bacteria.html