See here or here for background.

Nason Schooler is testing to what extent lipofuscin accumulation affects lifespan and using lasers to find out. IF lipofuscin is the key type of cellular junk that clogs up the clean-up and turnover machinery of the cell, and IF the laser treatment successfully removes lipofuscin, then one would think there should be an effect on lifespan.

Make your guess-timation as to how much longer (or shorter) the treated worms will live vs. controls. C. elegans lifespan is often quoted at 2 to 3 weeks. 14 to 21 days - so let us say 17.5 days. So for example, a 50% increase in lifespan would be an increase of 8.75 days, making the total lifespan 26.25 days.

For the purposes of this poll - let us guesstimate for the group of worms that are getting just 1 pulse of the laser. (there is a second group getting 3 pulses)

I admit, I don't know much about c. elegans, however, I am optimistic there will be a benefit to worm lifespan. I voted 5 to 9% lifespan increase.

This should be especially interesting for those taking carnosine or beta-alanine which has been proposed, with no recent research and likely not very much evidence, as a lipofuscin precursor. Still, a harmful effect would be something to consider, especially for those taking grams of beta-alanine each day in order to increase sports performance.
http://www.imminst.org/forum/index.php?sho...=0&p=165385

This post has been edited by Blue: Nov 15 2009, 08:16 PM

Guessing the lifespan change in the worms was of course supposed to be a revenue generating raffle, but I couldn't get enough information on the legality of it from Alabama and elsewhere to move forward. Sigh, maybe in the future.

Currently, I am pretty grossly clueless about the etiology of C. elegans diseases, so I've decided not to answer the poll question until I'm better informed. So if anyone could fill me in, what disease(s) usually kills these worms? Is it expected by Aubrey and others that all 7 SENS categories applies to these worms as well as humans? I tried google and wikipedia, but I could not find any relevant info. Thanks!

This post has been edited by 31stCentury: Nov 16 2009, 03:16 AM

Please feel free to state why you voted for increase or decrease. My reasoning is just a hunch, based on talking with Nason and a layman's understanding of lipofuscin.

Do you know when we will find out?

The testing began on November 14th. If the worms live longer than normal then it will be sometime in early December that we will find out. Get your votes in soon.

As a crude (very crude) approximation, worm aging is supposed to be a model for post-mitotic cell aging. So they tend to die from things that tissues like neurons or heart muscle die from -- lipofuscin accumulation, cell loss, mitochondrial issues, but not cancer.

Thanks for the explanation

Do you know of any good sites a layman could go to to learn more about elegans' causes of death?

I don't understand. How will a laser possibly reach the areas that are critical to sustaining life function. The skin is merely one part of the organism, and it is safe to assume that the laser will affect the skin primarily. Basically, wouldn't it be the functional equivalent of a skin care treatment for C. elegans?

Can we get a little more details on the experiment? I'm confused.

EDIT: From my base assumptions above, I will assume no change in lifespan.

This post has been edited by Elus Efelier: Nov 23 2009, 03:56 PM

The laser can be focused to a depth of 3cm in most tissue. C. Elegans can be uniformly and completely treated with the laser because they are so small.

For humans a surface treatment down to 2 or 3 centimeters would not cover the entire volume of the body but would be a significant percentage and could perhaps generate some benefit. More important is to establish what effect if any, this treament has on aging/lifespan via lipofuscin destruction/removal.

Operate, and laser the innards.

There's a sentence I never thought I'd compose.



--Inkstersco

LOL.

I see over 600 people have viewed this forum but only 21 votes. Unless the laser treatment creates immortal worms, the first run of this treatment will be over in a couple weeks. Get your vote in, just for fun, if nothing else.

Check here for updates; includes link to Nason's research blog.

This post has been edited by niner: Nov 28 2009, 03:17 AM

No data from round 1 yet ?

round 2 was supposed to start on the 25th, right ?

I think there were some problems; some of the worms got "lost". I'm not sure what that means. If you follow the links above to Nason's research blog, it's there.

Probably they created a super-worm, so the worm just leaved. Now serious, i really expect the result for these test.

I did, actually. The lost worms should only affect the accuracy/reliability of the data from round 1.

I would have hoped for some data, though.

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