Healthy ageing: a question of stress, damage and repair. Meeting on mechanisms of biological ageing.

The recent EURESCO meeting on biological ageing provided an excellent overview of several trends emerging in this field of research. After many years during which the field has been dominated by controversy over the role of predetermined genetic programmes versus stochastic damage, it is now becoming clear that ageing is the result of a combination of mechanisms that are genetically modulated via pathways of maintenance and repair. This realization raises many important challenges. T. Kirkwood (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK) illustrated this with data from a range of model systems (e.g. Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, mice, humans) that showed how intrinsic stochastic factors, such as the accumulation of random mutations, combine with genetic and environmental factors, such as the age-related expression of specific ‘ageing genes’, to shape the individual phenotype. In fact, the challenge of dealing with the heterogeneity of ageing at the molecular, cellular and organismal levels proved to be a recurring theme at this meeting. Integrating these multiple mechanisms also calls for new multidisciplinary approaches, as illustrated by the Biology of Ageing e-Science Integration and Simulation (BASIS) system being developed in Newcastle. This is planned to be a user-friendly interactive Internet interface that will involve collaborators around the world. Its main goal is to link theoretical ageing models with experimental data. For example, the ‘virtual ageing cell’ will be a module within which different elements can be activated or suppressed by the user in order to explore predicted outcomes. This module will focus on exploring the mechanisms of deterioration and damage resulting in age-related impairment and death.