Cologne Seminars on Ageing "A Systems Biology Perspective on Natural Variation and Aging"

About Daniel' s talk:

Over the past 30 years, researchers have discovered pathways associated with aging that appear to be evolutionarily
conserved over hundreds of millions of years. However, lab-based work in inbred strains may not reveal the mechanisms that
account for natural variation in aging. In the real world, variation in aging is due to a very large number of genetic and
environmental factors, many with very small effect sizes, leading to a considerable explanatory gap between upstream genetic variation and downstream phenotypic variation. To bridge this genotype-phenotype gap, researchers have turned to the use of systems biology approaches, and my own group has focused in particular on metabolomics, which measures the structural and functional building blocks of life. Motivated initially by our work in genetically variable populations of Drosophila, in recent years, we have turned our attention to companion dogs. The Dog Aging Project is an Open Science, long-term longitudinal study of the biological and environmental determinants of healthy aging in dogs. In this presentation, I will discuss recent results from systems biology studies in both flies and dogs, work that has the potential to tell us much about aging not only in model species, but also in our own species.