  Aging remains a fundamental open problem in modern biology. Although there
exist a number of theories on aging on the cellular scale, nearly nothing is
known about how microscopic failures cascade to macroscopic failures of
tissues, organs and ultimately the organism. The goal of this work is to bridge
microscopic cell failure to macroscopic manifestations of aging. We use tissue
engineered constructs to control the cellular-level damage and cell-cell
distance in individual tissues to establish the role of complex interdependence
and interactions between cells in aging tissues. We found that while
microscopic mechanisms drive aging, the interdependency between cells plays a
major role in tissue death, providing evidence on how cellular aging is
connected to its higher systemic consequences.
