Submitted Abstract
The average of human life expectancy has increased rapidly in the last decades. As people are living longer and longer, the impact of age-related diseases becomes more and more important. The single cell organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae is used as a model for the molecular mechanisms of aging in eukaryotic cells since almost two decades. As yeast is proliferating in an unsymmetrical way, there are two different approaches to determine its age. The chronological lifespan (CLS) is a measure for the time a non-dividing cell can survive and keep its ability to return into a dividing stage. The replicative lifespan (RLS) reflects the number of daughter cell that are budding of one mother cell, and thus resembles the aging of mammalian cells that undergo a fixed number of divisions before dying (such as fibroblasts). While there are technical approaches to determine the CLS in high-throughput, the RLS is still analysed using a manual method that was already introduced in 1953. Since 2012 a number of research groups have published microfluidic based cultivation devices, which allow the measurement of the RLS with an (compared to the manual method)increased throughput. As all this methods require sophisticated microfluidic equipment (microfluidic pumps, high-resolution microscopes, microfluidics incubators, visualisation software, etc.), their use is restricted to a small number of specialised labs. Thus, there is an urgent need for a new approach to determine the RLS.In the framework of the proposed project, we aim to address this need by establishing a microfluidic solution that requires no microfluidic equipment apart from the chip itself. We are sure to be able to achieve this goal by applying a chip design that fundamentally differs from published approaches in the way of trapping the cells and in the applied driving force of the microfluidic flow.