ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews experimental results and hypotheses pertaining to the physiology of mother cell-specific ageing in yeast. There is currently a worldwide renaissance of ageing research. This has to do with the fact that human life expectancy at birth has increased considerably over the last 50 years resulting in an increasing amount of the lifetime of people spent during retirement. This has not only produced considerable socio-economic problems but has also resulted in a growing awareness of how little we know about the basic biology of the ageing process and has intensified clinical, biomedical and biological ageing research. We start by pointing out what in our opinion are the most relevant open questions and proceed then to the more specific topic, that is, the metabolic changes and the influence of manipulation of metabolism on the ageing process in yeast. This treatment of yeast mother cell-specific ageing is, therefore, not comprehensive.
