Integrative biology of aging: Finding simple answers for a complex problem

From Santa Fe Institute Event Wiki

Aging is a major yet largely unexplained biological process. Although in most animals aging is characterized by complex changes affecting multiple systems, many have sought and proposed simple underlying causes for aging. In this talk, I will first briefly review the different theoretical frameworks devised to explain aging. Drawing from the many genes that have been related to aging in model organisms, one hypothesis is that aging is a genetically-regulated process. It is now necessary, however, to investigate how these genes relate to human biology and how they exert their influence as an aggregate or as a hierarchy to modulate the aging process. I will present our studies of aging-associated protein networks using GenAge (http://genomics.senescence.info/genes/), a database of genes related to aging in humans and model organisms. While identifying conserved aging genes is important, one of the most striking observations in gerontology is the variety of aging rates among similar species such as mammals or even primates. I will discuss the different mechanistic factors correlating with species longevity and how these have led to a number of hypotheses of aging. Moreover, I will talk of our recent genome evolution studies and how they may provide genetic insights into the evolution of longevity. Finally, I will discuss how to integrate these different approaches into testable hypotheses, and I will present the synthetic biology methods that we have been employing to evolve/construct mouse embryonic stem cells that can be used to develop new mouse models for the study of aging.