Bioinformatics and Aging

What are the genetic and cellular processes that control aging? Genome-wide gene expression studies coupled with bioinformatic analyses provide a new avenue to investigating this question. Bioinformatic analyses of functional genomic data can reveal the cellular processes involved and complement biochemical studies of aging.

My lab studies aging and bioinformatics. My lab is interested in the mechanisms by which organisms age and in understanding the genes and cellular processes that control the rate of aging. C. elegans, a small, transparent, free living soil nematode with a short lifespan is used as a model organism in these studies. Numerous genes which affect the aging process have been identified through traditional genetic and microarray studies. Studies of these genes, their interactions, and their roles in the aging process is needed to understand the cellular processes responsible for aging and how these processes interact to determine the lifespan of an organism.

My lab also develops and applies bioinformatic methods for analyzing genomic data. The lab investigates methods for rigorous data analysis and also methods for presentation and visualization of genomic data in forms accessible to biologists. These techniques are applied to data generated in the course of aging studies in the lab and are also applied to more broadly to knowledge discovery in functional genomic data sets.

Lab web site

• Lund J, Tedesco P, Duke K, Wang J, Kim SK, Johnson TE. Transcriptional profile of aging in C. elegans. Curr Biol. 2002 Sep 17;12(18)1566-73. (Full Text)
  Supplemental web page at http://cmgm.stanford.edu/~kimlab/aging/
• Kim SK, Lund J, Kiraly M, Duke K, Jiang M, Stuart JM, Eizinger A, Wylie BN, Davidson GS. A gene expression map for Caenorhabditis elegans. Science. 2001 Sep 14;293(5537)2087-92. (Full Text)
• Lund J, Chen F, Hua A, Roe B, Budarf M, Emanuel BS, Reeves RH. Comparative Sequence Analysis of 634 kb of the Mouse Chromosome 16 Region of Conserved Synteny with the Human Velocardiofacial Syndrome Region on Chromosome 22q11.2. Genomics2000 Feb 1;63(3)374-383. (Full Text)