Recommended online reading about the lifespan of single cells?

February 13, 2013 11:31 AM

What is the longest amount of time a single cell (whether on it's own or in an animal/plant) can live without either splitting or dying?

This is an odd question so it makes sense in trying to look it up I'm having a hard time finding the exact information I'm looking for. I'm looking for a comparison of the actual lifespan of single cells BOTH single celled organisms and the cell lifespans within multi-cellular organisms. I'd like specific amounts of times for different types of cells.

This is of course confusing since lifespan in single celled organisms is determined by reproduction times rather than cell death.

I'm interested in the cell death aspect of lifespan in single celled organisms and the various lifespans of different types of cells in multi-cellular organisms like plants and animals.

I'm curious what the longest amount of time a single cell (whether on it's own or in an animal/plant) can live without either splitting or dying.

I have cellular and molecular biology and microbiology/anatomy textbooks, but it's not so easy to find a break down of information on the specific life lengths of different types of cells within them (if such a break down is even in them or concentrated in one place).

I guess a better way to phrase this, if I were a single cell wanting to get as close to the fountain of youth as possible, what type of cell would I be (either single celled or what type of cell in a multi-cellular organism such a long living mammal or tree)? Is there miraculously a comparison of various cellular life lengths/death/reproduction times based on type of cell laid out in something like a chart like I dream of?

posted by xarnop to Science & Nature (9 answers total)

Best answer: There may be no upper limit - some cells can apparently survive indefinitely in a dormant phase. Here's a case where 45-million-year-old yeast cells were revived.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 11:44 AM on February 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

You may be interested in reading about the works of Dr. Alexis Carrel.
posted by ceribus peribus at 11:48 AM on February 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Some species of bacteria (a single celled organism) can transform themselves into endospores, a state of hibernation in which the bacterium is dormant and not metabolically active. Under the right conditions, these spores will spontaneously "reactivate". Does this period of dormancy count towards your cell lifetime? If so, under the right conditions these cells can survive in this state for enormous periods of time — scientists have reported the discovery of bacterial spores that they believe to be viable that are many millions of years old.
posted by RichardP at 11:49 AM on February 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

came in to second nerve cells/neurons and to mention: the LONGEST cells in the body are your nerve cells...the ones in your feet reach all the way into the brain...
also, the LARGEST single cell organisms were ony recently discovered on the bottom of the ocean (where the silt makes a totally homogeneous food supply for them)...they are the size of plums (i forgot what nature show i saw them in but i remember them saying they've probably been around a while as the tracks they leave rolling through the mud date really far back in the fossil record)
posted by sexyrobot at 12:16 PM on February 13, 2013

Best answer: oh duh...yes...encysted bacteria...millions to possibly billions of years...see Deinococcus_radiodurans and the concept of Panspermia, or the idea that life travelled to earth in the form of radiation-resistant bacterial spores trapped in extra-solar asteroids...
of course, you could make the argument that this isn't really 'living' or 'life' as there aren't any biological processes going on in a spore...it's really more like a super-stable seed. IIRC though, (certain) bacteria can encyst into a spore form and reawaken (usually in response to the presence of water) multiple times...living, then going dormant, then living again...
Long story short, it's not really a question that has an answer...cells that divide are effectively immortal, and certain cells in dormant states can last basically forever (but is that 'living'?)...but lots of cells (like red blood cells or sperm...ie cells that are split off of a different 'parent' cell) do have specific lifespans...RBCs a few weeks, sperm a few days...
posted by sexyrobot at 12:51 PM on February 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

The constraints you set for single-celled organisms feel very bizarre. They tend to reproduce as quickly as they can, or they enter some sort of quiescent state that could preserve them for a very long time.
posted by Good Brain at 4:06 PM on February 13, 2013

Response by poster: Hmm I didn't notice I put any constraints specifically, just that I was interested in the cell death aspect of single cell organisms lives (which I noticed not talked about anywhere I was looking) and how long cells could survive without reproducing. The answers have been great and very interesting! Thank you so much for the responses.

For what it's worth, I don't have any constraints on answers to this, it's more of a "Have you read anything relating to this subject and what did it say, where can I read more about it"

Than "Only if you define cell life cycle by narrow parameters should you answer this question." I find the whole subject and abiogenesis itself and the strange area between atomic structures and reactions and that which is called "life". Any answers are welcome! I was trying to specify that I was interested in how long one specific cell could continue to exist, and it was answered! The fact that when cells split they are then each called "new cells" is indeed a strange concept to me. It seems more like it's just a continuation of the same cell since no part of the cell really dies off. Sometimes I think definitions of life are so arbitrary as to be arguments of semantics/classification rather than more or less accurate depictions of truth.
posted by xarnop at 5:14 PM on February 13, 2013

In humans (and in some, though I can't say for sure all, other vertebrates), the cells of the lens of they eye stay with you for life (or until you get cataract surgery and take the lens out). The lens is formed relatively early during development, so if you're looking for long-lived cells in multi-cellular organisms and you define the "age" of the organism as time elapsed since birth, then these cells live longer than the "age" of the organism. So, to answer your question about longest-lived cells...I'm guessing the answer for multi-cellular organisms is probably going to be the lens of whatever the longest-lived vertebrate is. Wikipedia suggests the answer might be a turtle, a whale, or a koi fish.

Basically, the lens is formed like an onion. The cells at the center are the oldest, and cells at the edge divide inward. Since the lens needs to be transparent for effective vision, cells in the middle lose their nuclei and organelles. Would you call these cells alive? Perhaps not depending on your definition, but they are still metabolically active. Gap junctions allow cell-cell signaling and transport. Here's more information.

Also, unrelated to lens cells, have you heard of tardigrades? I have no idea about the fate of individual cells within the tardigrade, but the animal as a whole can live through really extreme conditions. They can live in a dehydrated state for hundreds of years.
posted by wondercow at 7:08 PM on February 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

xarnop, I just find the question of "how long cells could survive without reproducing" to be an odd and limiting framing, on the other hand, it actually a really interesting question, in part because it may be unanswered and even uninvestigated.

Breaking it down a bit, you get two questions:
1. Under what precise conditions is a given type of single-celled organism, say a particular strain of Ecoli, or Saccharomyces cerevisiae in a "normal" metabolic state and yet doesn't reproduce.
2. How long will said organism live under such conditions.

One difficulty in answering the question is that from a practical standpoint you need a relatively large population of such organisms, while still being able to establish that individual organisms weren't dying.

I guess you'd probably grow the cells in some sort of isotopically labeled growth medium, then spin them down in a centrifuge and then go from there. First step would be finding conditions under which the total concentration of organisms didn't change, then you'd look to see if the distribution of labelled DNA matched that of the initial sample, or whether it showed smearing, which would suggest that while the population size was stable, organisms were dying and their constituents reused. Once you'd arrived at the conditions, you'd then culture a big batch under those conditions and check on mortality over time.

One issue though, how prevalent in nature are the conditions settled on for the experiment.
posted by Good Brain at 8:50 PM on February 13, 2013