Mair Lab

Welcome to the Mair Lab! 

The Mair lab studies the basic biology of the aging process, driven by the central question: Why are we more likely to get chronic diseases when we are old than when we are young? What goes wrong in cells and tissues to increase overall risk, and is this decline inevitable or can we reverse it to bring healthy years to the elderly? 

In particular, we study the molecular and cellular mechanisms by which animals modulate their aging rate in response to changes in nutrition and their environment.

We’ve seen that fasting or reducing food intake profoundly slows aging across species from yeast to primates. This longevity is coupled with striking protection against age-related diseases, including some of the biggest health challenges in the elderly like Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disease, and many cancers.

More recently, we’ve begun to understand how obesity effectively accelerates aging, causing early onset of multiple chronic conditions, in addition to type 2 diabetes, which are usually not seen until later in life. By elucidating the genetic and molecular pathways that link metabolism and aging, we aim to replicate the positive effects of dietary restriction on lifespan and health without requiring changes to dietary intake. This could avoid the potential detrimental side effects of calorie reduction.

We exploit the conservation of aging mechanisms across evolution to study it in genetically tractable species like the nematode C. elegans. This allows us to gain novel insights into human aging by observing the aging process in real-time in a simple model organism.