Biological Aging

Front 1

The probability of death increases exponentially from about age 30. True/False

Back 1

True. In fact, it doubles every 7 years.Death rates tend to level off and even decline slightly fro very old people, who have reached their 100th year.

Front 2

What are programmed aging theories?

Back 2

The evolved organism design features purposely limit life span in order to obtain a non individual benefit or advantage. First proposed by August Weissman in 1882.

Front 3

Define aging.

Back 3

Aging is the result of accumulative deteriorative processessuch as oxidation, telomere shortening, other molecular damage, stochastic (random) changes, wear and tear, and disease specific processes. This would include the accumulation of cell mutations, or blood vessel deposits or damage.

Front 4

What are telomeres?

Back 4

They are simply end caps on chromosomes. Progressive shortening of telomeres during cell division has been implicated as an aging process.They can be repaired by the enzyme"telomerase".

Front 5

What is Progeria?

Back 5

The word Progeria comes from the Greek progeros meaning 'prematurely old'. The Greek word pro means 'before', while the word geras means 'old age'. HGPS (Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome) or Progeria is an extremely rare, fatal genetic condition.

Progeria affects children and gives them an appearance of accelerated aging.

Front 6

What is Werner's syndrome?

Back 6

Werner syndrome more closely resembles accelerated aging than any other segmental progeria, so it is often referred to as a progeroid syndrome, as it partly mimics the symptoms of progeria.

Front 7

What is the antagonistic pleiotropy theory?

Back 7

George Williams, then a professor at Michigan State University, published a paper in 1957 titled Pleiotropy, Natural Selection, and the Evolution of Senescence (Evolution 11 398-411). Pleiotropy is defined as a situation in which a single gene controls more than one trait. In human genetic diseases, a defect in a single gene often can affect a number of traits and have simultaneous diverse symptoms such as nerve and vision problems, bone deficiencies, and skin changes. In general, a single gene can be activated in more than one tissue and therefore a defect in a single gene can affect more than one tissue.
Pleiotropy refers to the observation that a single gene often affects different and diverse phenotypic properties.

Front 8

What is the disposable soma theory?

Back 8

The Disposable soma theory, proposed in 1977 by Thomas Kirkwood, presumes that the body must budget the amount of energy available to it. The body uses food energy for metabolism, for reproduction, and for repair and maintenance. With a finite supply of food, the body must compromise, and do none of these things quite as well as it would like. It is the compromise in allocating energy to the repair function that causes the body gradually to deteriorate with age.[7]

Front 9

The Aldebra giant tortoise has a maximum life span of 255 years. True/False

Back 9

True.
Lobsters are believed to be negligibly senescent and even apparantly have increased reproductive capacity with age.

Front 10

What is the oldest known single living organism?

Back 10

The Methusalah Tree. It is a bristlecone pine, located in California and is currently believed to be over 4800 years old.

Front 11

What is Semelparity?

Back 11

Many species of plants and animals reproduce only once(semelparity) and die suddenly after reproducing.
The pink salmon dies suddenly after reproducing(at 2 years of age) of an apparantly accelerated aging process.

Front 12

What is apoptosis?

Back 12

is the process of programmed cell death (PCD) that may occur in multicellular organisms.[3] Biochemical events lead to characteristic cell changes (morphology) and death. These changes include blebbing, cell shrinkage, nuclear fragmentation, chromatin condensation, and chromosomal DNA fragmentation. (See also apoptotic DNA fragmentation.)