Illuminating the physicochemical perspective on ageing

In movies, it may be the environment of a dark and gloomy décor and threatening music that makes you understand the actions of the actors in the scene. In this analogy, in biology, we may only truly understand the joint activities of the biomolecules - the actors - if we also know the physicochemical context - the environment - of these biomolecules. With physicochemical context we mean e.g. the values for pH, the concentrations of molecules like ATP or reducing equivalents, or the total concentration of biomolecules, also called the crowding level. We know that these parameters are actively maintained by the cell in a normal healthy condition. However, in the process of ageing where we observe a multitude of phenotypes, potential changes in the intracellular environment have not been previously mapped. In this thesis, we show that the intracellular environment that hosts and facilitates the function of biomolecules and cellular processes is derailed in the process of ageing. We speculate that, further exploration of the consequences of this modification can help us provide context to the cellular dysfunction we observe in ageing.