Cutting calories lets yeast live longer
Earlier study that showed opposite result was flawed
MOTHER LODE Yeast mother cells on a diet of 2 percent glucose bud an average of about 24 daughters in a lifetime. The more researchers reduce the glucose, and thus the calories, that yeast consume, the longer the fungi live and the more offspring they can produce.
M.C. Jo et al/PNAS 2015, SCIMAT/SCIENCE SOURCE
Cutting calories keeps yeast alive and growing long past the time they’d usually stop reproducing, a large-scale study shows.
The finding, published online the week of July 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may come as a relief to researchers who study aging. A 2014 report tracked thousands of Saccharomyces cerevisiae at once and concluded that restricting calories did not lengthen the life span of the baker’s yeast (SN Online: 7/30/14). Longevity researchers contended then that the tracking method was flawed and that restricting calories was still the most tried-and-true way to lengthen life.
A new mass-tracking apparatus, called a microfluidic single-cell analysis chip, confirms that yeast on a low-calorie diet live much longer than yeast
