Live Long and Reproduce

Insulin and other insulin-like growth factors signal through a pathway that involves phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase and the forkhead transcription factors. This pathway is a critical regulator of life-span and reproduction in many organisms. Dillin et al. have now determined that in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, life-span can be regulated through this pathway only in the adult and reproduction only in the developmental phases. Thus, the long-standing notion that life-span can be lengthened only at the expense of reproductive fitness is almost certainly false. A. Dillin, D. K. Crawford, C. Kenyon, Timing requirements for Insulin/IGF-1 signaling in C. elegans. Science 298, 830-834 (2002). [Abstract] [Full Text]