For many, the idea of living forever is unappealing. Even if good health is thrown into the bargain, interest in immortality remains ambivalent. But what if we could stay healthy right up until a timely death? Recent work from the Houseley lab suggests that, at least in budding yeast, healthspan can be extended without also extending lifespan. In a 2023 paper, they showed that a galactose diet suppresses senescence (i.e., loss of fitness) in aging yeast without extending their lifespan. In a recent preprint, they claim to achieve the same effect in yeast on a normal (glucose-rich) diet by activating AMPK while simultaneously preventing AMPK-mediated repression of fatty acid synthesis.

Here’s an intriguing sentence from the discussion (that, however, might benefit from being split into two sentences): “It is not too surprising that issues arise when AMPK is ectopically activated on high glucose given that AMPK is a central energy regulator that evolved to manage metabolism under low nutrient conditions, and it is perhaps more surprising that a single point mutation largely corrects these issues, providing optimism that the benefits of AMPK activation could also be maximised in higher eukaryotes.”

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Re-engineering of acetyl coenzyme A metabolism prevents senescence in budding yeast
bioRxiv, March 2025
From the lab of Jon Houseley.

Snippet by Katrina Woolcock.

Image credit: Figure 5 from Hadj-Moussa et al. linked above (CC-BY).