Frauke Neff
First author of the study that separated what rapamycin does to lifespan from what it does to ageing itself
Institute of Pathology and German Mouse Clinic, Institute of Experimental Genetics, Helmholtz Zentrum München, German Research Center for Environmental Health (affiliations as given on NEF2013 and EIS2016)
NEF2013 is one of the more uncomfortable papers in this corpus, and one of the more useful. Rapamycin does extend murine lifespan — that part replicated. But when the same mice were put through a broad phenotyping battery covering many age-sensitive traits, most of them were not rejuvenated. Some of what looked like an anti-ageing effect was better explained as a direct pharmacological effect that happens to be beneficial.
The result is a boundary condition the Atlas keeps in view whenever the lifespan literature is quoted: living longer and ageing more slowly are separate claims that need separate evidence, and a single survival curve does not settle the second one.
She also appears in EIS2016 through the German Mouse Clinic's phenotyping of the spermidine-fed animals — the same discipline applied to a different intervention.
Milestones in the Atlas
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2013 | A | Rapamycin extends murine lifespan but has limited effects on aging NEF2013 First author: rapamycin extended lifespan in mice while leaving most age-sensitive phenotypes unchanged, separating lifespan from ageing. |
| 2016 | A | Cardioprotection and lifespan extension by the natural polyamine spermidine EIS2016 Co-author: contributed to the German Mouse Clinic phenotyping of spermidine-treated mice. |
Co-authors in the Atlas
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Frauke Neff.
- Dan Ehninger Showed that rapamycin reverses learning deficits in adult mice carrying a tuberous sclerosis mutation, and later tested carefully whether rapamycin's lifespan effect reflects a true slowing of ageing
- Didac Carmona-Gutierrez Studies how cell death and autophagy shape ageing at the University of Graz, and contributed to the studies showing that spermidine extends lifespan through autophagy
- Frank Madeo Established spermidine as a dietary compound that extends lifespan in yeast, worms, flies and mice, and showed that the effect depends on autophagy
- Christoph Magnes Analytical chemist at Joanneum Research whose group contributed the mass-spectrometry measurements of polyamines in the Graz spermidine studies
- Christoph Ruckenstuhl Yeast geneticist who works out how amino-acid restriction and vacuole acidity set lifespan
- Junichi Sadoshima Studies how mTOR, autophagy and mitophagy protect the heart under stress and in ageing, and contributed to the finding that spermidine protects the heart
- Sabrina Büttner Studies how organelles communicate inside cells and how that communication breaks down with age, and contributed to the Graz studies showing that spermidine extends lifespan by inducing autophagy
- Sabrina Schroeder Researcher in Frank Madeo's group at Graz who has contributed to the spermidine studies from the first yeast longevity experiments to work in mice
- Tobias Eisenberg Showed as first author that the dietary polyamine spermidine extends lifespan by inducing autophagy, and later that it protects the heart in an autophagy-dependent way