Mini Review
Drosophila aging 2006/2007

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Abstract

Research on aging in Drosophila continues to provide new insights into this complex process. Drosophila is highly amenable to study aging because of its short generation time, comprehensive resources for genetic manipulation, and functionally conserved physiology. Importantly, many of these physiological processes such as heart function, sleep, and metabolism functionally senescence in older flies. As the evolutionarily conserved insulin and TOR pathways are critical regulators of aging, the influence of insulin and TOR signaling on these processes is an important area for future research. An important emerging theme is determining the age-dependent alterations that occur at the organ level and how this functional senescence is regulated by different tissues.

Section snippets

Sleep

The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, can be used as an effective model organism to study sleep (Hendricks et al., 2000, Shaw et al., 2000). Sleep in the fly is identified using behavioral criteria that were established in the days before the electroencephalogram became the standard for identifying sleep in mammals and birds. The criteria include: (1) prolonged periods of quiescence; (2) reduced responsiveness to external stimuli; (3) rapid reversibility, which distinguishes sleep from

Cardiomyopathies and arrhythmias

Novel methods for investigating fly heart function have recently become available that promise to dramatically expand the possibilities for screening mutants and for analysis of cardiac contractility and stress response in Drosophila (Wessells et al., 2004, Wolf et al., 2006, Ocorr et al., 2007a, Ocorr et al., 2007b). One method uses a non-contact echography, optical coherence tomography (OCT), discussed last year in Exp. Gerontol. (Lim et al., 2006), to image the contractions of the heart (

Coordination of tissue aging

Tissue and functional aging of organs is an important component of the regulation of organismal lifespan, yet the underlying regulation and coordination of these processes remains largely unknown. One mechanism influencing lifespan is genetic variation. For example, there are polygenic influences contributing to lifespan regulation (Wilson et al., 2006). Although many quantitative trait loci (QTLs) have been identified that contribute to the variation in longevity, how these QTLs functionally

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