TY  - INPR
AV  - public
Y1  - 2020/04/16/
TI  - Shorter life and reduced fecundity can increase colony fitness in virtual Caenorhabditis elegans
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1111/acel.13141
ID  - discovery10095203
N2  - In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, loss of function of many genes leads to increases in lifespan, sometimes of a very large magnitude. Could this reflect the occurrence of programmed death that, like apoptosis of cells, promotes fitness? The notion that programmed death evolves as a mechanism to remove worn out, old individuals in order to increase food availability for kin is not supported by classic evolutionary theory for most species. However, it may apply in organisms with colonies of closely related individuals such as C. elegans in which largely clonal populations subsist on spatially limited food patches. Here, we ask whether food competition between nonreproductive adults and their clonal progeny could favor programmed death by using an in silico model of C. elegans. Colony fitness was estimated as yield of dauer larva propagules from a limited food patch. Simulations showed that not only shorter lifespan but also shorter reproductive span and reduced adult feeding rate can increase colony fitness, potentially by reducing futile food consumption. Early adult death was particularly beneficial when adult food consumption rate was high. These results imply that programmed, adaptive death could promote colony fitness in C. elegans through a consumer sacrifice mechanism. Thus, C. elegans lifespan may be limited not by aging in the usual sense but rather by apoptosis?like programmed death.
N1  - Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Aging Cell published by the Anatomical Society and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
JF  - Aging Cell
A1  - Galimov, ER
A1  - Gems, D
KW  - C. elegans ecology
KW  -  adaptive death
KW  -  evolution of aging
KW  -  evolutionary modelling
KW  -  inclusive fitness
ER  -