Colloque “Expanding evolutionary theories of ageing” (mai 2022)

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.

• View podcasts ->Colloque intenational Expanding evolutionary theories of ageing

PUBLICATION (2023)

• Bapteste, E., Huneman, P., Keller, L., Teulière, J., Lopez, P., Teeling, E. C., Lindner, A. B., Baudisch, A., Ludington, W. B., & Franceschi, C. (2023). Expanding evolutionary theories of ageing to better account for symbioses and interactions throughout the Web of Life. Ageing Research Reviews, 89, 101982. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arr.2023.101982