Cologne Seminars on Ageing "Why do some individuals live longer? Identifying the sources of multi-scale heterogeneity in aging."

About Dr. Stroustrup's talk:

Aging involves functional declines at multiple spatial scales, with molecules, cells, tissues, and organs changing together over time. My group develops interdisciplinary methods to decipher how the mechanisms of aging are coupled together by functional interdependencies across all of these scales. With a better understanding of the systems biology of aging, we might more predictably design molecular interventions that improve organismal outcomes.
In this talk, I’ll discuss our development of systematic approaches that use population asynchrony to map gene-regulator networks in aging. More than 70% of human lifespan variance cannot be explained by heritable factors, and yet the intrinsic biological sources of lifespan variance remain poorly understood. In C. elegans, we discover that variation at the scale of organs, rather than individual genes, is the largest source of inter-individual heterogeneity in aging. Screening for genes that influence inter-organ coordination during aging, we identify a diverse set of molecular mechanisms contributing to heterogeneity in gene-expression, “health”-span, and lifespan. In particular, we identify a set of pleiotropic genes whose perturbation, even late in life, dramatically reduces lifespan variance—providing new experimental entry points for studying how noise propagates across multi-cellular, aging systems.

This event is aimed at a specialist audience.