Olga Xintarakou

Profile

Projext title: Investigating mTOR activity effects on cellular metabolism and cytoarchitecture

Summary: Cellular ageing is a crucial characteristic of each species. The mechanisms underlying ageing, as well as the process of cellular senescence, are associated with multiple molecular pathways, particularly with the mechanistic Target of Rapamycin (mTOR) pathway. mTOR signalling demonstrates evolutionary conservation, with homologues identified from yeast to mammals and has been implicated in many processes regarding ageing such as autophagy, cell stem regulation, mitochondrial function and cellular senescence.

Our focus for this research is to investigate the molecular mechanisms and fundamental principles governing senescence and lifespan and how the acceleration of ageing leads to a variety of disorders, including neurodegeneration, cardiovascular diseases, cancer and diabetes. In this context, we aim to understand the gene and protein networks associated with metabolism, cellular cytoarchitecture, and lifespan processes, downstream of TOR, using a variety of cellular model systems and conducting experiments in human cell lines which recapitulated yeast observations.

Supervisor:

• Dr Charalampos (Babis) Rallis

Research