Abstract
Ageing research focuses on identifying lifespan modifiers and understanding and appropriately interpreting their effects. One of the most relevant quantities being studied is the shape of the survival curve that can reveal crucial information on the mechanism of action. Here, we introduce a bilogistic model to describe the shape of the lifespan curves of Caenorhabditis elegans populations. Using the corrected Akaike information criterion and the RMSE as goodness-of-fit tests, we show that the bilogistic model provides a better fit to the experimental data from nematode worms than other mathematical models and can identify and confirm biphasic lifespan data. Our parametric model offers a method to interpret replicate experiments data in terms of the shape parameters of the lifespan curve and enables robust statistical analysis of intra- and inter-group variance. We apply the model to novel lifespan data from C. elegans and Drosophila melanogaster and provide a rational statistical analysis of lifespan modifiers such as temperature and daf-16/FOXO mutation.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 220991 |
Pages (from-to) | 220991 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Royal Society Open Science |
Volume | 10 |
Issue number | 2 |
Early online date | 1 Feb 2023 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Feb 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was supported by the EPSRC grant EP/M02735X/1. M.S. and A.E. acknowledge support through EU project, grant number 642190.Keywords
- Organismal and evolutionary biology
- Research articles
- lifespan curve
- mathematical modelling
- Caenorhabditis elegans
- Drosophila melanogaster