How to Model Parkinson's Disease in Worms

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We were trying to figure out, could we model parkinson's disease? And so if you just take it at its most a basic level, say it's an age related motor defect. Is there something that we could find in worms? And so that's why we started these assays where we would knock down the jeans from this list and then look at how that changed the worm's swimming behaviour. We really wanted to model what happens with age if you got rid of a gean,. So i'm doing that. The top 20 or so causes weird defect. They would curl up. And we'd never seen that before. So they curled up and uncurl, and they get stuck

Aging -- everybody does it, very few people actually do something about it. Coleen Murphy is an exception. In her laboratory at Princeton, she and her team study aging in the famous C. Elegans roundworm, with an eye to extending its lifespan as well as figuring out exactly what processes take place when we age. In this episode we contemplate what scientists have learned about aging, and the prospects for ameliorating its effects -- or curing it altogether? -- even in human beings. Coleen Murphy received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford University, and is currently Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute of Integrative Genomics at Princeton. Home page at the Lewis-Sigler Institute Lab web page Princeton Profile Google Scholar publication page Twitter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.