Institute of Healthy Ageing

Jorge Ivan Castillo-Quan, PhD student in the Partridge lab, recently published his work on 'From white to brown fat through the PGC-1α-dependent myokine irisin: implications for diabetes and obesity' in Diseases, Models & Mechanisms.  For more, see DMM

20 April 2012

Dr David Gems attended the 2nd International Conference "Genetics of Aging
and Longevity" in Moscow (April 22-25th) where he gave two talks. He
also acted on the Scientific Advisory and
Programme Committee to help organize this interesting meeting, which was
well attended and which helped to foster links between scientists
working on ageing in Russia and the rest of the world. For details see http://aging-genes2012.ru/en/

Our congratulations go to Daniel Pearce who has been awarded a grant of £319,330  from BBSRC for a 3 year project working on 'The effect of calorie restriction on mouse haematopoietic and skeletal muscle stem cells'.  

Congratulations to Dr Helena Cocheme (Partridge Lab) on the publication of her paper entitled 'Using the mitochondria-targeted ratiometric mass spectrometry probe MitoB to measure H(2)O(2) in living Drosophila' in Nature Protocols.

3 April 2012

Our congratulations go to Professor Janet Thornton, Dr Irene Papatheodorou (Partridge Lab) together with Dani Wieser and Matthias Ziehm of EBI, Hinxton.  It has been announced that their paper 'Computational biology for ageing' was amongst the Top 10 downloaded Phil Trans B articles from the Royal Society in 2011.

March 7 - 11 2012

Dr Ekin Bolukbasi (Partridge Lab) attended the 53rd American Drosophila Genetics Conference in Chicago. Ekin writes:

I had the opportunity to attend the 53rd American Drosophila Genetics Conference in Chicago. It was a great meeting featuring plenary talks from famous Drosophilists such as Carl Thummel, Suzanne Eaton and Denise Montell. Furthermore, I was particularly intrigued by the high quality science presented during platform sessions of Drosophila Models of Human Disease as well as Ageing and Physiology, which highlighted once again the power of Drosophila as a model organism to investigate basic biomedical questions affecting human health. This year’s Larry Sandler award went to Stephanie Turner Chen, University of California Riverside for her discovery of Identification of a new class of odorants that are present in the food and are responsible for inhibition of carbon dioxide sensitive neurons in the antennae during. Since related odorants are effective inhibitors of the CO2 response in Culex mosquitoes too, they could potentially be used as very effective mean of disease control transmitted by these mosquitoes.

Dr Matt Piper spent the week commencing 26th March 2012 in Portugal teaching on the PhD programme of the wonderfully named Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown.  Entry to the programme is extremely competitive and Matt's topic of "Neurobiology and nutrition' was well received by the students.

7 March 2012

Matt Piper has been awarded a grant of £138,100 for 3 years from the Royal Society to work on: "Characterising the mechanisms underlying lifespan / fecundity trade-offs".

March 2012

"A baby born tonight will live on average five hours longer than a baby born last night. Why and how is life expectancy increasing so quickly? How much of this extended life will be in good health? What do we really understand about the mechanisms of ageing?"

Drs David Gems and Matt Piper will be speaking on this topic at the Cheltenham Science Festival on 15th June.  The festival is held annually as an open to the general public event where over 300 of the world's greatest thinkers, comedians, writers and scientists come together to celebrate and explore all things scientific.

March 2012

The IHA are pleased to announce that we will be exhibiting this year at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition with our exhibit, entitled "How yeast, worms and flies can help us live healthier for longer".

March 2012

Sahar Emran, PhD student in the IHA's Piper lab, has been chosen by UCL's Outreach Office to participate in a programme of taster lectures to be given by PhD students to schoolchildren aged 13 to 18 from schools across London. The aim of the lectures is to introduce the audience to the range of subjects studied at UCL and inspire them to want to study at university.

March 2012

Congratulations to Tosin Taiwo, PhD student in Daniel Pearce's lab, whose first paper on Methylome analysis using MeDIP-seq with low DNA concentrations has been published in Nature Protocols.

'How Ageing Evolves'

22 February 2012

Dr David Gems participated in the Darwin's Birthday debate held at the
Natural History Museum, along with Dr Daryl Shanley (University of
Newcastle). The topic of the debate was "Reconciling mechanistic and
evolutionary theories of ageing." David Gems argued for the bloated soma
theory, an alternative to the disposable soma theory of ageing; Daryl
Shanley defended the disposable soma theory. The event, introduced by
Prof Adrian Lister (NHM) and chaired by Dr Max Reuter (UCL) was well
attended and there were many questions and comments from the audience.

Biology of Ageing

12 - 17 February 2012

Jorge Ivan, a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Linda Partridge and Prof. John Hardy, represented the IHA at the Biology of Ageing Gordon Research Conference in Ventura, California (USA) with a poster. Jorge presented his work about drugs that modulate healthy lifespan and ameliorate neurodegeneration.

10 February 2012

Philip Campbell PhD, Editor-in-Chief of Nature and Nature Publications today congratulated Professor Linda Partridge for her 'exceptional' contributions to refereeing  papers submitted to Nature journals. 

February 2012

Ms. Li Li, who carried out her MSc research project here at the IHA, will continue her PhD studies with a Parkinson's UK PhD fellowship. Li will be studying the interaction of ageing and neurodegeneration using the fruit-fly as a model organism in the Partridge Laboratory.  

February 2012

Whilst on holiday in Australia, Dr Nazif Alic from the Partridge Laboratory visited Sydney's Randwick Public School where he gave a talk to a class of 8 year old Biology students on Genetics and Genetic mutations - see their blog entry re his visit.

24 January 2012

The IHA waves goodbye to Dan Ackerman, who has joined Celeste Simon's
group at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Pittburgh,
USA as a postdoc to work on HIF signaling and cancer. Also leaving the
lab is Sara Valentini. Both Sara and Dan obtained their Ph.D. at the IHA
(David Gems's lab). Also, Kathrin Schmeisser, a visiting Ph.D. student
from the University of Jena (Michael Ristow's lab) returned home after a
4 month research visit. This month Dr Alex Benedetto joined the lab to
work on the biology of sex differences in ageing in C. elegans. Alex
worked previously on the genetics of manganese transport and toxicity in
C. elegans with Prof. Michael Aschner at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

23 September 2011

Publication in Nature of controversial study led by the Gems and Partridge labs reassessing the role of sirtuins in C.elegans and Drosophila.

20 September 2011

A study led by Professor Arne Akbar, Associate of the IHA, was published today.  The work focussed on ways to revitalise white blood cells that were thought to have been deactivated after fighting infections.

Previous research had suggested that white blood cells had a finite lifespan, meaning they gave less protection as a person aged.  This was thought to be determined by 'caps' on the end of DNA called telomeres which get shorter as the body fights infection.  Prof Akbar's team showed however that some white cells were inactive yet had long telomeres, suggesting another mechanism in the immune system was switching them off.  When they blocked off the newly identified pathway, they found that the white blood cells appeared to 'come to life' again.

For more on this story, see the following links:

Press coverage
Journal of Immunology
view article

16 September 2011

The IHA was today visited by students from the Glenlola Collegiate School from Bangor in Co.Down as part of a tour of UCL for the Northern Irish schoolgirls.  The group of 25 was shown around both the fly and molecular labs and given the opportunity to view fly and worm work in action.

12 September 2011

Deputy Director of the IHA, Dr David Gems, today took part in a panel discussion hosted by the Provost Dr Malcolm Grant at UCL's Institute of Ideas.  The debate on a compulsory retirement age for academics was thought-provoking and insightful and greatly enjoyed by the large audience.

For more, see Times Higher Education article

22 August 2011

Congratulations to Dr Nazif Alic of the Partridge Lab whose recent paper 'Genome-wide dFOXO targets and topology of the transcriptomic response to stress and insulin signalling, Mol Syst Biol. 2011 Jun 21; 7:502' was voted 'exceptional' on the Faculty of 1000 web site