Cell Polarity and Aging

Another good find from Ouroboros, an outline of differential distribution of damage to daughter cells and the origins of aging: "Let's pretend you are a unicellular organism - what would be the best strategy to ensure the long-term multi-generational survival of your lineage? One approach is to distribute everything equally amongst your two offspring. ... A second approach is to give all the crap to one of the two new cells and keep the other one pristine. Lets call these two cells the crap cell and the pristine cell. What's the result of this second strategy? Using our crap metric from above, the first cell accumulates 10 units of garbage over its lifetime and then gives it all to one offspring, the crap cell, and none to the other offspring, the pristine cell. Those cells then grow and by the time they divide each second generation cells have made 10 units of additional crap each. The crap cell has 20 units the pristine cell 10. The two cells divide and dump all their garbage on one of their offsprings. One cell starts with 20 units of crap, one cell with 10 units and two cells are again crap free. The end result of this strategy? Part of your descendents will become more and more decrepit as they fill up with crap, while others remain pristine."

Link: http://ouroboros.wordpress.com/2008/12/16/cell-polarity-and-aging-a-unifying-theory/

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