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
Postdoctoral researcher, Institute of Molecular Biosciences, University of Graz · BioTechMed-Graz & Field of Excellence BioHealth, University of Graz · Madeo group, University of Graz (since 2009)
Schroeder appears in both spermidine papers in this atlas, and she is one of the people who actually ran the experiments rather than only supplying a technique. The 2009 Nature Cell Biology paper names her among the researchers who carried out the yeast work, which is where the central claim was built: feeding yeast spermidine made them live longer, and deleting the autophagy gene ATG7 took the benefit away. In the 2016 mouse follow-up she is listed third among more than fifty authors, at the Graz institute where the spermidine feeding and autophagy readouts were done.
Her own first-author paper, in Cell Reports in 2021, extended the story to the brain. She showed that spermidine given in drinking water reaches mouse brain tissue, raises hypusination of the translation factor eIF5A in the hippocampus and improves how the mitochondria there respire; old mice then learned spatial tasks better. In flies the boost in mitochondrial respiration required the autophagy gene Atg7 and the mitophagy genes Parkin and Pink1, and knocking down Pink1 in neurons abolished the improvement in olfactory learning, which is the argument that the memory effect runs through cellular recycling and not through some unrelated route.
That trio of papers is why the spermidine branch is interesting for an mTOR atlas even though spermidine is not an mTOR drug. Rapamycin switches autophagy on by blocking mTORC1; spermidine switches it on by inhibiting histone acetyltransferases, changing which genes the cell transcribes. Schroeder's work sits on the second route and keeps testing it with the same tool every time: remove an autophagy gene and see whether the benefit survives.
Milestones in the Atlas
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2009 | A | Induction of autophagy by spermidine promotes longevity EIS2009 The paper's author-contribution statement lists her among the researchers who performed the yeast experiments on which the spermidine-autophagy link rests. |
| 2016 | A | Cardioprotection and lifespan extension by the natural polyamine spermidine EIS2016 Third author of the mammalian follow-up, based at the Graz institute that ran the mouse spermidine feeding and the autophagy measurements. |
Co-authors in the Atlas
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Sabrina Schroeder.
- Didac Carmona-Gutierrez 2 shared studies 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 2 shared studies 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 2 shared studies Analytical chemist at Joanneum Research whose group contributed the mass-spectrometry measurements of polyamines in the Graz spermidine studies
- Christoph Ruckenstuhl 2 shared studies Yeast geneticist who works out how amino-acid restriction and vacuole acidity set lifespan
- Sabrina Büttner 2 shared studies 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
- Tobias Eisenberg 2 shared studies 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
- Frauke Neff First author of the study that separated what rapamycin does to lifespan from what it does to ageing itself
- 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