Project Outline

Work on the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans revealed that many interventions can modulate lifespan and health span. For instance, restriction of food and manipulations of the reproductive system results in animals living up to 50% longer than normal. In our lab, we found conditions that make animals live 5 times longer than normal, by manipulation components of the diet. The goal of the project is to understand the mechanisms by which animals have such long longevity and to understand the sex differences.

Techniques

• gene editing tools to generated mutant nematodes (e.g., CRISPR/Cas9)
• generation of transgenic nematodes (e.g., tagging of specific proteins with fluorescent markers)
• microscopy (e.g., time lapse videos, confocal microscopy)
• bioinformatics (e.g., writing scripts in Unix, R and Python)
• mathematical modelling (R, Python)