Are humans just multicellular yeasts?

Again via the Brent Kearney link on Stan's site.

http://phys.org/news/2012-11-scientists-key-events-early-cellular.html

discussing this paper

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11654.html

I especially like the last sentence of these two paragraphs:

These results are just the newest chapter in a "decade-old interest," according to Gottschling. He and his colleagues have made several landmark discoveries in the past 10 years, including finding that aging yeast cells exhibit the same genomic instability seen in human cancer cells and proving that mitochondrial dysfunction causes that instability. Gottschling's team also has developed innovative tools to leverage the power of yeast as a model organism, including a technique called the Mother Enrichment Program that makes experiments more efficient by enabling researchers to generate large populations of aging yeast cells.

"It's worth using yeast to study complex things like aging because a lot of person-years of research have gone into understanding the fundamentals. The genetic and cell-biology tools available for studying yeast are unparalleled," Gottschling said. "Having the proper tools is like having new glasses; you can see things you never could before, and once you start to see new things, you can dissect them to understand how they work."

The full paper is a Letter to Nature. That means it is technically very dense, but very interesting.

Caloric restriction to a yeast is, essentially, glucose restriction. In organisms with a circulation, an hormone system and a background FFA supply, caloric restriction at the cellular level (where it matters) is achieved by resisting the insulin mediated facilitation of glucose access, ie glucose restriction. Using superoxide.

Palmitate please, with just a very little glucose.

Peter