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Imprimer

Expanding evolutionary theories of ageing to take into account symbioses and interactions throughout the Web of Life

Du
au
Campus Jussieu 4 Pl. Jussieu 75005 Paris
Colloques
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The event is free, hybrid (attendees can join either in person or virtually) but upon registration by email before November 28th to : epbapteste@gmail.com. 

This colloquium will seek to explore traditional limits to the main evolutionary theories of ageing and to propose novel findings to improve our understanding of how, why and when organisms age in the Web of Life. It will question the explanatory scope and the phylogenetic scope of at least three leading, stimulating evolutionary theories of ageing, namely the Mutation Accumulation theory, the Antagonistic pleiotropy theory and the Disposable Soma theory. Indeed, these theories share a common blindspot. The first two have been developed under the traditional framework of population genetics, and therefore are logically centered on the ageing of individuals within a population or within a species. The third one is usually applied to explain ageing within a species. Consequently, these theories do not explicitly model the countless interspecific and ecological interactions, such as symbioses and host-microbiomes associations, however well-known to affect many organismal traits as well as organismal evolution. Moreover, these theories have been mostly developed with animal models in mind, mainly those with a neat germen/soma distinction, such as mice and humans, and for this reason all these theories may benefit from novel conceptual developments to further justify and possibly expand their application scope towards other taxa, such as unicellular organisms (protists, bacteria and archaea), which have long been considered, by default and probably erroneously, as non-senescent, and such as extremely long lived taxa, which owing to their unusual biology may still have some lessons to contribute to these theories.

Scientific program for the day:

Provisional program (the speaker order is not truly in order yet)

  • The current theoretical framework and some of its limits
    • Pr. Annette Baudisch (University of Southern Denmark, DK) «  Inclusive definitions of aging across scales of organization»
    • Pr. Joao Pedro de Magalhaes – distancial- (University of Birmingham, UK) « Do we need (unifying) evolutionary theories of aging and what for?»
    • Pr. Mark Mc Auley (School of Science, Engineering and Environment, University of Salford Manchester, Salford): Emerging ideas about the evolution of aging
       
  •  Ageing and regeneration
    • Dr. Marina Shkreli (Institute for Research on Cancer and Aging, Nice (IRCAN), France) « Aging and regeneration»
    • Dr. Lucie Laplane (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne & Institut Gustave Roussy, France) « Philosophy of biology: Stem cells and the triad development/regeneration-aging-cancer »
    • Dr. Elena Sergeeva (Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology, Tufts UniversityUSA): Aging as a Default State
       
  •  Transcriptomics and aging
    • Dr. Michael Rera (Unité de Biologie Fonctionnelle et Adaptative, Paris, France) « Rethinking ageing as a discontinuous process»
    • Dr. Eric Bapteste (CNRS, ISYEB, Paris, France) « Tracking inter- and intra-individual heterogeneity during aging using networks »

Open issues

Dr. Claudio Franceschi (University of Bologna, Italy) «What we still ignore about aging despite decades of research ? »

Alternative models to study ageing

  • Dr. Ido Pen (Faculty of Science and Engineering, The University of Groeningen, NL) « Ageing and cooperation/ageing in social insects »
  • Dr. Sergi Munné-Bosch (Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences, University of Barcelona, Spain) « Aging and senescence in plants »
  • Pr. Hanna Salman (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pittsburgh,USA) & Pr. Zoltan Oltvai (Department of Pathology, University of Pittsburgh, USA) -remote talk-  « Bacterial ageing. »
  • Dr. Giovanni Levi (MNHN, Paris, France) « How mutations on Dlx genes limited to GABAergic neurons in the brain affect metabolism, sociality, and aging. »
  • Pr. Bjoern Schumacher (Institute for Genome Stability in Aging and Disease,University of Cologne, Germany) « Aging clocks based on accumulating stochastic variation »
  • Pr. Vadim Gladyshev (Harvard Medical School, USA) « Epigenetic, aging and rejuvenation »