Smurfs in mice

Here’s the pre-registered protocol at BMC Biology.

We aged a cohort of 50 AKR/J female mice until their death from natural causes (APAFIS #18333-2018112915281820v6) and measured, every 3-4 weeks (represented by the vertical arrows), intetsinal permeability, body composition, behavioural parameters, ...

When re-aligned on the date of death instead of the date of birth, i.e. physiological vs chronological ages, ALL the parameters behave in biphasic manner, thus confirming our initial hypothesis.

The Smurf assay allows us to divide the life-history of single individuals into the two-phases (left figure) that we previously described (Rera et al., 2012; Tricoire and Rera, 2015).

As previously described in flies (Rera et al., 2012; , nematodes and zebrafish (Dambroise et al., 2016) Smurfs increase in proportion as age increases while the remaining lifespan of Smurf mice is largely independent from the chronological age at transition Tricoire and Rera, 2015).