The Murphy Lab

Murphy Lab 11-2023

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What governs how fast we age? Why do some biological processes stop working earlier than others? And what is happening at the molecular and cellular level as some organisms age while others continue to thrive?

Although seemingly philosophical in nature, these questions address one of the major mysteries of biology, the process of aging. With recent developments in genetics, molecular biology, and genomics, we now have the possibility of addressing these questions at the molecular level. Because our ultimate goal is not simply to extend lifespan, but to improve overall health, we must identify the genes associated with biological functions that we typically associate with quality of life. The goal of our laboratory's work is to understand the molecular mechanisms governing longevity and maintenance of the biological processes that exhibit age-related decline.

Recent Publications

10 Publications
Journal Article

The potential to carry out high-throughput assays in a whole organism in a small space is one of the benefits of , but worm assays often require a large sample size with frequent physical manipulations, rendering them highly labor-intensive. Microfluidic assays have been designed with specific questions in mind, such as analysis of behavior,…

Journal Article

A small RNA from a clinical isolate of PA14, induces learned avoidance and its transgenerational inheritance in . However, it is not known if small RNAs from bacteria found in natural habitat can regulate host behavior and produce heritable behavioral effects. Here we found that GRb0427, a pathogenic strain isolated from the microbiota,…

Journal Article

Loss of cognitive function with age is devastating. EGL-30/GNAQ and G signaling pathways are highly conserved between C. elegans and mammals, and murine Gnaq is enriched in hippocampal neurons and declines with age. We found that activation of EGL-30 in aged worms triples memory span, and GNAQ gain of function significantly improved memory…

Contact information

Carl Icahn Lab 140
Princeton University
Princeton NJ, 08540

Lab phone: 609-258–9505

Coleen Murphy
Director of LSI
Director of Simons Foundation's SCPAB - https://www.simonsfoundation.org/collaborations/plasticity-and-the-aging-brain/
Director of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for Aging Research at Princeton University
Professor of Molecular Biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics
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