Why do some species live for only weeks while others survive for centuries? Researchers at the Leibniz Institute on Aging—Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI) in Jena have developed AEGIS, a freely available software tool that enables scientists to simulate evolution on a standard computer and investigate how lifespan and aging evolve under different ecological pressures and genetic constraints.

Described in a new study published in PLoS Computational Biology, the platform represents years of development and marks an important milestone in the evolutionary biology of aging.

Aging is not a fixed property of life. Across the tree of life, species differ dramatically when they start to age, how fast they age, and how long they live. Understanding what evolutionary forces produced this diversity is one of the deepest open questions in biology.