Overachievements in Worm Longevity
Merely doubling healthy life span is old hat, last decade work now. We can engineer far better nematode worms than that: "C. elegans strains bearing homozygous nonsense mutations in the age-1 gene [produce] progeny that were thought to undergo obligatory developmental arrest. We now find that, after prolonged developmental times at 15-20 degrees C, they mature into extremely long-lived adults with near-normal feeding rates and motility. They survive to a median of 145-190 days at 20 degrees C, with nearly 10-fold extension of both median and maximum adult lifespan relative to [a] long-lived wild-type stock into which the null mutant was outcrossed. PI3K-null adults, although a little less thermotolerant, are considerably more resistant to oxidative and electrophilic stresses than worms bearing normal or less long-lived alleles." This and similar work forms an impressive set of technology demonstrations - there is no necessarily direct relevance to extending healthy human life span, but it certainly gets people fired up and excited.
The objective is surely to understand the ageing process. Ayyadevara et al published this work in 2007 but i don't know of any explanation as to why PI3K-null mutants live so long - perhaps someone could enlighten me?