Discovering and targeting mechanisms of aging regulation

Abstract

Aging has become the major risk factor for human morbidity and mortality. However, a complete understanding of this process and the pathways that can interfere with it is still missing. Likewise, efficient pharmaceuticals that would slow down aging have not been developed. My lab tries to address both these points.

In this presentation, I will tell about three recent studies from my lab. In two of them, we explored mechanistic aspects of aging-preventive pathways – with a particular focus on the aging-preventive transcription factor DAF-16/FOXO and how it regulates the expression of its target genes.

In the third study, we developed and applied a transcriptomics-based screening approach in human cells, to identify aging-preventive compounds.