Blair Benham-Pyle
Baylor College of Medicine, TX·Biology·Early-career
Aging and many age-related diseases, including cancers, come from damage that slowly builds up in cells and tissues. This damage can wear down the adult stem cells that keep tissues working.
- Fields
Biology
Genetics
- Topics
aging
rejuvenation
regeneration
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Determine how age-associated damage builds up and shows itself across the life cycle of asexual Schmidtea mediterranea flatworms, using standard assays for conserved hallmarks of aging.
- Identify the cell types and signaling pathways that control cellular aging and the detection of aged tissue in planarians, using unbiased genomic and transcriptomic profiling.
- Test which genes are needed for tissue rejuvenation and for keeping stem cells working across generations, using RNA interference (RNAi) to switch off candidate genes.
More about the research
Repeated injuries can also trigger inflammation that speeds up aging across the whole body. Most anti-aging research has used short-lived animals such as mice, flies, worms and yeast. Far less is known about animals that regenerate well and resist age-related disease. This project studies one such animal to learn how a body can rejuvenate itself.
Why it matters
Learning how an aging-resistant animal detects and repairs aged tissue without developing disease could reveal mechanisms relevant to people. Over time, this knowledge could inform therapies that boost the regenerative capacity of injured and aging tissues, and could help improve anti-cancer and anti-aging treatments in humans.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Josephina Van Wolfswinkel
Yale University, CT·Biology
Determine how source transcripts for piRNAs, small RNAs that silence jumping genes, are generated and recognized in planarian neoblast stem cells, and how the response is kept away from important genes.
E. Jane Hubbard
New York University, NY·Biology
Identify the molecular mechanisms by which insulin/IGF-like signaling acts from other tissues to drive age-related decline of the one-cell germline stem cell niche in C. elegans.
Leslie Pick
University of Maryland, MD·Genetics
Determine how the milkweed bug Oncopeltus achieves pair-rule segment patterning without the canonical pair-rule genes used by Drosophila, using expression analysis, RNA interference and CRISPR/Cas9.
The school
Baylor College of Medicine: 38 labs on PI Pages, $881M a year on research, 115 research doctorates a year.
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