Molecular Microbiology (@molmicrounihoh.bsky.social)

🥸 Aging of Escherichia coli! Protein aggregation drives cell aging in a size-specific manner in E. coli! 👇 | mBio journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... @mbio.bsky.social #coli #antiaging #aging

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Protein aggregation drives cell aging in a size-specific manner in Escherichia coli | mBio Among the simplest organisms known to age, Escherichia coli bacteria suffer a functional decline as misfolded proteins accumulate into aggregates retained by the mother cell upon division. This mechanism places the loss of proteostasis as a conserved hallmark of aging. However, subsequent studies found no deleterious effects of harboring aggregates. By quantifying single-cell fitness and damage dynamics, we found that it is not the mere presence of an aggregate that drives a fitness decline, but the intracellular space it occupies. Yet, aging cells undergo a gradual enlargement that could allow them to sustain stable growth despite harboring intracellular damage. Cell enlargement thus emerges as another cross-domain aging phenotype, but with curiously opposite effects: protective in bacteria, whereas generally deleterious in eukaryotes. Our findings, therefore, offer a connection between damage dynamics, aging, and cell size regulation at the single-cell level, while tracing new parallels between bacterial and eukaryotic aging. https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.02050-25