GEE-IHA Joint Seminar - Professor Joao Pedro de Magalhaes, University of Liverpool

Academic Host:Jürg Bahler
Abstract: Ageing has a profound impact on human society and modern medicine, yet it remains a puzzle of biology. Considerable progress has been made in model organisms with many genes shown to regulate ageing. It is now necessary, however, to investigate how these genes work as an aggregate to modulate the ageing process. In this talk, I will present our network and systems biology studies of ageing to gain insights on which processes and pathways impact on ageing and age-related diseases. We also applied computational and integrative methods to dietary and pharmacological manipulations of ageing, revealing new life-extending drugs. Lastly, I will discuss our work in sequencing and analyzing the genome of long-lived mammals, like the naked mole-rat and the bowhead whale, to identify genes and pathways under selection in long-lived lineages that may be part of longevity assurance mechanisms.