Do Bacteria Age?

Biologists call the aging process senescence because they simply cannot go on living without inventing new words that sound far more complicated and science-y than the ones they are replacing.

When I think about aging (or senescence, if you think that sounds better, because you’re a snob), I usually consider organisms that go through different developmental stages because it’s easy to see the aging process:

But bacteria don’t go through these stages. They aren’t born as baby bacteria that grow into adult bacteria.

While multicellular creatures grow by adding more cells, bacteria are single-celled creatures, so they don’t grow. A bacterial cell is and always will be just one bacterial cell (but that doesn’t stop bacteria from multiplying and producing millions more of themselves). Bacteria also don’t have babies like animals do: to reproduce they split in half and form two daughter cells.

Since they don’t go through the developmental stages we usually associate with aging, is there any evidence that they actually grow old?

The answer is, “Um, kinda.”

Aging is basically the accumulation of cell damage. As years go by, all of our cells acquire damage (some faster than others). Signs of such cell damage include wrinkles, grey hair, crankiness, and/or feebleness.

Bacterial cells accumulate damage too, but they have a way around this (which is really no fair). When an old, damage-laden bacterium splits in two, it doesn’t spread the damage equally. It turns out that bacteria are able to transmit most or all cell damage to just one daughter, making a nearly perfect daughter cell and a rejected step-child one.

This is a great way to prolong the life of the bacterial colony: concentrate all the negatives into one area, like Texas.

I hope the Beverly Hills crowd doesn’t catch wind of this. They might try to clone themselves a damage-catcher to harbor all of their signs of aging. I mean, ick. Plastic surgery is bad enough as it is.