Specialized Core Areas
Administrative Core
- Provides effective leadership, administration, and management of the Center.
- Supports the External Advisory Board of distinguished scientists who provide review and recommendations to the executive leadership of the Center and engages in outreach activities, including workshops, courses, lectures and symbosia.
- Oversees and ensures dissemination of Center resources and research findings to the geroscience community and collaborates with other funded Nathan Shock Centers.
- Supports an inter-Nathan Shock Center Geropathology Research Resource (GRR) led by Dr. Warren Ladiges.
Research Development Core
- The Research Development Core provides support for researchers nation- and world-wide, most often junior faculty, to develop pilot data to aid in new project and career development. This is assisted by granting of competitive awards for pilot project support for studies in the basic biology of aging, using the key resources provided by our Resource Cores. Successful pilot projects will capitalize on the strengths of our four Resource Cores and awardees will be mentored by a senior investigator in the biology of aging. The Pilot Project program will be actively advertised and applications solicited nation-wide. The great majority of awards have been, and will continue to be made to investigators outside our region.
Protein Phenotypes of Aging Core
- Designed to provide the geroscience research community with access to state-of-the-art proteomics technologies. The Core has been at the forefront of developing technologies to perform large-scale targeted proteomics assays that generate near complete data matrices, accurate quantitation, and high reproducibility – even across multiple laboratories.
- The primary goal of the Proteomics Core is to apply these improved methods to studies of aging, to obtain accurate quantitative measurements of peptides from samples provided by its users, and to aid geroscience researchers in linking these high-dimensional data to biologically meaningful outcomes. In addition, the Core will apply new assays well- suited to aging as they are developed.
- This Core also works closely with the Metabolite Phenotypes of Aging Core, which shares some of the same facilities.
Metabolite Phenotypes of Aging Core
- Designed to provide state-of-the-art hardware and software tools to detect, identify and quantify aging-associated metabolites, to assist in the experimental design and statistical analysis of these metabolite profiles, and to develop novel analytical tools for more powerful analysis of metabolome studies.
- The Core has developed a variety of targeted metabolomic assays suitable for a wide range of studies relevant to the biology of aging, including detailed profiling of the NAD+ metabolome.
- This Core also works closely with the Protein Phenotypes of Aging Core, which shares some of the same facilities.
Invertebrate Longevity and Healthspan Core
- Assists investigators throughout the research community in quantifying a variety of longevity and healthspan measures in two of the major invertebrate model organisms: the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. This is accomplished through direct collaboration, training and outreach, and the development and dissemination of new tools and technologies.
- New technologies we develope and disseminate include microfluidic tools for invertebrate aging studies and the WormBot, a robotic system for high-throughput survival and behavioral phenotyping in C. elegans.
- We also work to develop chemostat-based solutions for obtaining age-matched pure populations of yeast for biochemical and cell biological experiments requested by Core users. The focus on yeast and worms allows us to provide services and technologies to a large number of external investigators and thereby have a correspondingly large impact.
- The data generated by this Core can often be correlated with high dimensional computational analyses and with the protein and metabolite phenotypes studied in the other Nathan Shock Center Cores.
- Invertebrate models are also highly accessible to junior investigators, and our Center pilot projects allow these investigators access to the full range of integrated services provided by the Center Resource Cores.
Artificial Intelligence and Bioinformatics Core
Available Support:
- Application of Explainable AI analytical approaches for mechanistic insights into aging biology.
- Application of XAI applications for large cohort datasets.
- Innovative approaches for analyzing single cell transcriptomics
Core Leader
Su-In Lee, PhD
Email