…Jonas Hauptmann says: “We are the first to obtain direct electrical control of the smallest magnets in nature, one single electron spin. This has vast perspectives in the long run. In our experiments, we use carbon nanotubes as transistors. We have placed the nanotubes between magnetic electrodes and we have shown, that the direction of a single electron spin caught on the nanotube can be controlled directly by an electric potential. One can picture this single electron spin caught on the nanotube as an artificial atom.”

In this project, the UW researchers studied many different strains of yeast cells that had lower protein production. They found that mutations to the ribosome, the cell's protein factory, sometimes led to increased life span. Ribosomes are made up of two parts -- the large and small subunits -- and the researchers tried to isolate the life-span-related mutation to one of those parts.

“What we noticed right away was that the long-lived strains always had mutations in the large ribosomal subunit and never in the small subunit,” said the study's lead author, Kristan Steffen, a graduate student in the UW Department of Biochemistry.

The researchers also tested a drug called diazaborine, which specifically interferes with synthesis of the ribosomes' large subunits, but not small subunits, and found that treating cells with the drug made them live about 50 percent longer than untreated cells. Using a series of genetic tests, the scientists then showed that depletion of the ribosomes' large subunits was likely to be increasing life span by a mechanism related to dietary restriction -- the TOR signaling pathway.

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Although scientists don’t yet know whether Gcn4 plays a similar role in organisms other than yeast, Kennedy points out that worms, flies, mice and humans all have Gcn4-like proteins that appear to be regulated in a similar way.