The Fast Life

"Live fast, die young": the lifestyle of both wayward rockstars and small animals around the world. Different animal species have many structural similarities – rockstars and mice share a basic body pattern, with heart, lungs, veins and more – but vastly different lifespans. A faster lifecycle requires more rapid development, and early developmental processes take half the time in mice compared to humans. To understand this, researchers examined cells in isolation and in situ, and tinkered with gene expression, and found that the speed of core biochemical reactions (shown here in mouse and human cells) that govern cellular processes was independently determined within each individual cell. The rate of reactions like protein degradation sets the pace of development. Knowing this might help understand how to prevent developmental disorders, where things get ahead of themselves, and even the fundamentals of ageing, so we can all live a long life, at whatever pace we choose.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Video from work by Mitsuhiro Matsuda and colleagues
• European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Barcelona, Spain
• Video copyright held by and reproduced with permission from the AAAS
• Published in Science, September 2020