The cloning and sequencing of longevity genes that extend the life-span of Caenorhabditis elegans has energized interest in the use of animal models for understanding of approaches to the postponement of human aging. Nearly 30 years of extensive studies have accumulated a great deal of information on the longevity and aging of C. elegans. This proposed pilot project will develop a database of all published information regarding the longevity and aging of all C. elegans strains. Preliminary analyses will demonstrate the usefulness of the database for developing and testing hypotheses on aging. Life tables will be developed from C. elegans populations data and incorporated into the database. Other demographic analysis will include the application of six of the most frequently used mortality and survival models in gerontological research, Gompertz, de Moivre, Makeham, Exponential, Weibull and Logistic models, to scrutinize the assembled existing aging data. The database will be Internet-assessable and eventually placed in a public domain and available on the World Wide Web for user convenience. Although the database will provide a lot of information on the phenotypic analysis of gene in the complimentary of the C. elegans genome database, its development will mainly facilitate the researches in aging area, and could lead to the establishment of more animal aging databases including other aging-model organisms as references for the studies of human aging. The proposed demographic analysis and the aging data assembled will facilitate studies in a new and promising area of biodemography of longevity in C. elegans.
