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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 66: Focus Session: Aging in Physical and Biological Systems (joint session DY/ BP)

DY 66.6: Talk

Friday, March 20, 2015, 11:45–12:00, BH-N 334

Parametrization and interaction analysis of survival curves — Ivan G. Szendro¹, Rahul Marathe², Yidong Shen³, Adam Antebi³, and •Joachim Krug¹ — ¹Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Cologne, Germany — ²Department of Physics, IIT Delhi, India — ³Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing, Cologne, Germany

A key signature of biological aging is the increase of mortality with age. Age-dependent mortality can be extracted from the survival curve, which monitors the surviving fraction of a population of individuals as a function of time. Experiments on longevity-related mutations and interventions in model organisms typically focus on mean life span only, thus neglecting much information contained in the shapes of survival curves. Here we present an exploratory study aimed at parametrizing experimental survival curves obtained for the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. To this end, we fit survivorship data to models of varying complexity, including the classical Gompertz law as well as models based on reliability theory. We also analyze the multidimensional interactions between different interventions and mutations, using a published data set that contains all combinations of two interventions (dietary restriction and temperature) and two genetic mutations (daf-2 and clk-1).