I mostly got there with undergrad biology, biochem, physiology, and then just reading these papers until they started making sense. My undergraduate was physics; my PhD in medical physics is when I took biochem and physiology. Still, I couldn’t make sense of literature until a couple of months of brute force reading. IMO much of the difficulty comes from crazy protein/gene naming and terms of art. Also, this paper has a particularly passive voice.

Here’s the meat:

The synergistic lifespan extension of the daf-2 rsks-1 mutant can be suppressed by inhibiting GLD-1 or key transcriptional regulators of UPRmt. Therefore, the insulin-like signaling and TOR pathway-mediated tissue-specific translational repression of cytochrome c induce a cell non-autonomous mitochondrial stress response to promote longevity.

They messed up two genes which stresses the mitochondria just enough. There’s probably more too it, but the specific mitochondrial stress response seems to be a critical component to the life extension effect.