Presented at the Yeast Genetics Meeting, Stanford University

From August 22 to 26, 2018, I presented my research at the Yeast Genetics Meeting at Stanford University.

It is an unusual conference. The organism is the same for everyone, but the questions range from evolution to human disease. Yeast is simple enough to study in depth and close enough to us to be useful.

That combination is why baker’s yeast has been one of biology’s most productive model organisms for decades. Its genome was the first eukaryotic genome to be fully sequenced. Many of the core processes we now study in human cells, from how cells divide to how they recycle damaged components, were first worked out in yeast. A room full of yeast researchers is, in practice, a room full of people studying the basic machinery of life from every possible angle.

What I presented

My talk was about a plant extract that extends lifespan and delays the onset of age-related decline in baker’s yeast. The work came out of our screen of plant extracts in Vladimir Titorenko’s lab at Concordia.

The point I wanted to make was that lifespan alone is not the whole story. An intervention that keeps cells alive longer but leaves them frail for most of that time is not the goal. What interested me was that this extract also delayed the decline that normally comes with age. In aging research, that distinction between living longer and staying functional longer is the one that matters most, and it is just as relevant in yeast as it is in people.

Presenting to people who know the organism as well as you do is the best test of an idea.

I also tried to explain why we used yeast for a question like this. Chronological aging in yeast, where cells stop dividing and slowly lose function, mirrors the aging of non-dividing cells in our own bodies. And because experiments take weeks instead of years, it is one of the few systems where you can screen many candidates and still have time to study the mechanism of the ones that work.

Why it mattered to me

Presenting to people who use the same model, but for completely different questions, is the best test of an idea. They know the organism well enough to find the weak points. That kind of feedback is what turns a result into a stronger study.

At most conferences, the audience knows your field but not always your system. Here it was the opposite. People asked about strains, growth conditions and controls in a way only specialists can. Some of those questions were uncomfortable, and that is exactly why they were useful. A result that survives that kind of scrutiny is one you can build on with more confidence.

My perspective

I encourage every graduate student to present in rooms where people can genuinely challenge them. It is tempting to choose audiences that will be impressed. It is far more valuable to choose audiences that will push back. The comments you get from experts who have no stake in your conclusion are worth more than months of work in isolation.

Conferences like this also remind you that science is a community effort. Your experiment is one piece of a much larger picture, and seeing how others use the same organism to answer very different questions is one of the best ways to find your next idea.