Early manifestations of replicative aging in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae

The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is successfully used as a model organism to find genes responsible for lifespan control of higher organisms. As functional decline of higher eukaryotes can start as early as one quarter of the average lifespan, we asked whether S. cerevisiae can be used to model this manifestation of aging. While the average replicative lifespan of S. cerevisiae mother cells ranges between 15 and 30 division cycles, we found that resistances to certain stresses start to decrease much earlier. Looking into the mechanism, we found that knockouts of genes responsible for mitochondria-to-nucleus (retrograde) signaling, RTG1 or RTG3, significantly decrease the resistance of cells that generated more than four daughters, but not of the younger ones. We also found that even young mother cells frequently contain mitochondria with heterogeneous transmembrane potential and that the percentage of such cells correlates with replicative age. Together, these facts suggest that retrograde signaling starts to malfunction in relatively young cells, leading to accumulation of heterogeneous mitochondria within one cell. The latter may further contribute to a decline in stress resistances.