Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Japanese Photoaging Research Society, Kobe, Japan, 23 August 2002

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has proven a robust genetic model for studies of aging and the roles of stress. In this review we focus on the genetics of select long‐lived and short‐lived mutants of C. elegans that have proven useful in revealing the relationships that exist between oxidative stress and life span. The former are known to be controlled by an insulin/insulin‐like signaling pathway, while the latter are affected by mitochondrial functions.