To explore mechanisms underlying cellular dysfunction and cognitive decline in the aging brain.
Decades of research have gone into cataloguing the changes that occur in every cellular system with age
- Declines in the protein quality control mechanisms, mitochondrial function, DNA damage, repair pathways, and gene expression regulatory machinery have been extensively documented to occur with age. And each of these alterations contributes to the cellular dysfunction and cognitive impairment in the aging brain.
However, importantly, many aged people show minimal cognitive decline, with only certain individuals exhibiting significant impaired cognitive performance.
Our group is searching key factors differentiating these cognitively impaired aged brains from the high-functioning . Furthermore, we investigate how they initiate or accelerate age-associated cellular dysfunction and cognitive decline.
Lopez-Otin et al., 2013 (Cell)