NOMIS Awardee Anne Brunet’s groundbreaking research into aging was featured in an article in Switzerland’s Tagesanzeiger. Brunet and her lab have pioneered the naturally short-lived African killifish as a promising new model to identify principles underlying aging and suspended animation. A translated excerpt follows:
Killifish embryos live for six months. Researchers are beginning to understand how they do this—and hope to gain insights into how human cells age.
Fish that survive on dry land, completely without water, for up to eight months or even longer? While this may sound completely absurd, it actually exists. We are talking about killifish, more precisely the turquoise killifish, which lives in ponds in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. During the short rainy season, the ponds are full of water, but during the longer dry season, they dry out completely. And there, in the dry mud, embryos of these fish survive the drought by pressing the pause button on life, so to speak, and simply halting their own development.
Read the Tagesanzeiger article (German): Kann dieser Fisch helfen, das Altern zu stoppen?
