At the cellular level, many aspects of aging are conserved across species. This has been demonstrated by numerous studies in simple model organisms like Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Caenorhabdits elegans, and Drosophila melanogaster. Because most genetic screens examine loss of function mutations or decreased expression of genes through reverse genetics, essential genes have often been overlooked as potential modulators of the aging process. By taking the approach of increasing the expression level of a subset of conserved essential genes, we found that 21% of these genes resulted in increased replicative lifespan in S. cerevisiae. This is greater than the ~ 3.5% of genes found to affect lifespan upon deletion, suggesting that activation of essential genes may have a relatively disproportionate effect on increasing lifespan. The results of our experiments demonstrate that essential gene overexpression is a rich, relatively unexplored means of increasing eukaryotic lifespan.

在细胞水平上，衰老的许多方面在不同物种之间是保守的。对简单模式生物如酿酒酵母、秀丽隐杆线虫和黑腹果蝇的大量研究已经证明了这一点。由于大多数基因筛查通过反向遗传学检查功能突变的丧失或基因表达的减少，因此必需基因作为衰老过程的潜在调节剂常常被忽视。通过采取增加保守必需基因子集表达水平的方法，我们发现这些基因中有 21% 导致酿酒酵母的复制寿命延长。这高于发现删除后影响寿命的约 3.5% 的基因，表明必需基因的激活可能对延长寿命产生相对不成比例的影响。我们的实验结果表明，必需基因过度表达是一种丰富的、相对未经探索的延长真核生物寿命的方法。