Ants live 10 times longer by altering their insulin responses

[andrewlee224]

As in the subject, here's the article about the study:

Ants Live 10 Times Longer by Altering Their Insulin Responses | Quanta Magazine

Queen ants live far longer than genetically identical workers. Researchers are learning what their longevity secrets could mean for aging in other species.

www.quantamagazine.org

In short, it seems that an ant queen (which has the same genome as other ants) can live 10 times longer than normal ants, and the study claims it's due to altering their insulin response, and making insulin less harmful.

This seems to be in accordance with Peat's views that aging is not necessarily encoded in the genome.

Do you think a similar strategy could be somehow implemented in humans? Does insulin have a harmful effect in humans (I do not recall Peat's views on this)?

 

[ElmerElmer]

The researchers found the answer hiding in the details of insulin signaling. When insulin binds to its receptor on a cell surface, it sets off cascades of reactions inside the cell, including two distinct chemical pathways. One pathway activates an enzyme called MAP kinase and is critical for metabolism and ovary development. The other pathway suppresses a transcription factor that seems to promote a longer life span. To the researchers’ surprise, when they looked at the ovary and the fat body (which is roughly equivalent to the mammalian liver) in gamergates, they found that the MAP kinase pathway was active but the other one was not.

Further work showed that the ovaries of the gamergates strongly expressed a protein, Imp-L2, that ignored the MAP kinase pathway but interfered with the second pathway in the fat body. “This protein appears to have the function of protecting one pathway that allows metabolism, but inhibiting the pathway that leads to aging,” Desplan said.

I'm really quite a novice when it comes to this stuff, but this paragraph here casts doubt for me on the role of insulin as stated in the title. As far as I know, Ray's ideas were that insulin increases the permability of cells. So to say that insulin is binding to receptors is already a misunderstanding. From Ray's point of view, the insulin should increase permability and therefore cause all sorts of reactions to take place, so to explain the effects in the study we must infer that there is something else is causing the second pathway to be surpressed.

For the researchers it seems like they saw the relation with insulin and the pathway and assumed they were done? Their explanation is just that insulin must change its signaling behavior? To me it just seems like the short lived ants have very specific pathways that cause them to age/die, and simply by turning them off they live longer. Not a lot to grab onto to say how the pathways are activated or not, but it would be interesting to research further