ArticlePLoS biology2019
Cell aging preserves cellular immortality in the presence of lethal levels of damage.
Article in PLoS biology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 46 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Protein aggregation as a bistable switch in bacterial cell fate: from adaptive dormancy to cytotoxic death.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Review
- Nonequilibrium polysome dynamics promote chromosome segregation and its coupling to cell growth ineLife · 2025Article
- Lineage-dependent variations in single-cell antibiotic susceptibility reveal the selective inheritance of phenotypic resistance in bacteria.Nature communications · 2025Article
- A link between aging and persistence.Antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy · 2025Article
- Manipulating subcellular protein localization to enhance target protein accumulation in minicells.Journal of biological engineering · 2025Article
- Nonequilibrium polysome dynamics promote chromosome segregation and its coupling to cell growth inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Progressive decline in old pole gene expression signal enhances phenotypic heterogeneity in bacteria.Science advances · 2024Article
- Impact of Protein Aggregates on Sporulation and Germination ofMicroorganisms · 2023Article
- Talk to Me-Interplay between Mitochondria and Microbiota in Aging.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
- Damage dynamics and the role of chance in the timing of E. coli cell death.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Intercellular interaction mechanisms promote diversity in intracellular ATP concentration in Escherichia coli populations.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Bacterial respiration during stationary phase induces intracellular damage that leads to delayed regrowth.iScience · 2022Article
- Cellular senescence, rejuvenation and potential immortality.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Microfluidics for long-term single-cell time-lapse microscopy: Advances and applications.Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2022Review
- From DNA damage to mutations: All roads lead to aging.Ageing research reviews · 2021Review
- Asymmetry, division of labour and the evolution of ageing in multicellular organisms.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Challenges of analysing stochastic gene expression in bacteria using single-cell time-lapse experiments.Essays in biochemistry · 2021Article
- Nontraditional systems in aging research: an update.Cellular and molecular life sciences : CMLS · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cellular aging, a progressive functional decline driven by damage accumulation, often culminates in the mortality of a cell lineage. Certain lineages, however, are able to sustain long-lasting immortality, as prominently exemplified by stem cells. Here, we show that Escherichia coli cell lineages exhibit comparable patterns of mortality and immortality. Through single-cell microscopy and microfluidic techniques, we find that these patterns are explained by the dynamics of damage accumulation and asymmetric partitioning between daughter cells. At low damage accumulation rates, both aging and rejuvenating lineages retain immortality by reaching their respective states of physiological equilibrium. We show that both asymmetry and equilibrium are present in repair mutants lacking certain repair chaperones, suggesting that intact repair capacity is not essential for immortal proliferation. We show that this growth equilibrium, however, is displaced by extrinsic damage in a dosage-dependent response. Moreover, we demonstrate that aging lineages become mortal when damage accumulation rates surpass a threshold, whereas rejuvenating lineages within the same population remain immortal. Thus, the processes of damage accumulation and partitioning through asymmetric cell division are essential in the determination of proliferative mortality and immortality in bacterial populations. This study provides further evidence for the characterization of cellular aging as a general process, affecting prokaryotes and eukaryotes alike and according to similar evolutionary constraints.
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