📢 PhD Studentship Available (UK Home Students Only)
A fully funded PhD studentship is available in my laboratory.
✔️ Tuition fees fully covered for UK home students
🗓️ Application deadline: 15 February
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
📢 PhD Studentship Available (UK Home Students Only)
A fully funded PhD studentship is available in my laboratory.
✔️ Tuition fees fully covered for UK home students
🗓️ Application deadline: 15 February
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
Funding?
I'm a simple academic, so I'll have to await someone smart to explain to me how "pausing" MRC and BBSRC funding is the action of a biomedical science superpower...?
😂
and this is after a full round of review at Nature...
read the paper anyway, it's still good :) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A welcome finish to what has been, & continues to be, a rough year.
Proud to have been a (small) part of this work published in @elife.bsky.social, which, as always from the Dobson Lab, is meticulous, thorough & insightful.
PhD studentship at @glasgow.ac.uk #Mitochondria × #spectroscopy × #machinelearning.
Detect mitochondrial defects, estimate age, and identify anti-ageing drugs across species.
Supervisors: @albertosanzmon1.bsky.social @mariogonzalez.es & @nealdawson.bsky.social
UK Home fees only.
shorturl.at/wvMQa
Huge congratulations to Abigail Giles whose paper has just come out in Nature Cardiovascular Research - from a great collaboration with Bob Balaban, along with Thomas Krieg and Tish Murphy.
doi.org/10.1038/s441...
We have updated a previous preprint from our laboratory, and after two additional years of experiments, we now present new findings that fundamentally reshape how we—meaning us, not necessarily everyone—understand ageing.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Are flies good models for ageing? Absolutely—perhaps not perfect for human ageing, though. However, if we want to extend radically human lifespan, we will need to succeed first in “simpler” animals, worms and flies.
Many questions remain. Other multiprotein complexes may follow the same developmental “set-and-freeze” logic.
In short:
• Development sets mitochondrial capacity
• Early dysfunction permanently limits lifespan
• Adult flies cannot rebuild or remodel OXPHOS (or their capacity is very limited)
Thus, OXPHOS levels are fixed during development because they are difficult to replace, and short-lived organisms avoid doing so—trading longevity for reproductive efficiency.
We believe this reflects evolutionary logic: in short-lived animals, there is no point investing in adult mitochondrial repair. They must reproduce quickly, leaving no time for extensive turnover...
Here’s the twist: adult mitochondria cannot rebuild their respiratory chain.
OXPHOS proteins have exceptionally long half-lives; RNAi in adults fails to reduce respiration, and adult-only rescue cannot restore it.
The OXPHOS system is fixed for life at eclosion.
Crucially, this misprogramming can be corrected—but only during development.
Partial restoration of mitochondrial function (AOX) or metabolic rewiring (Rheb) in development rescues lipid homeostasis, restores autophagy balance and dramatically extends adult lifespan.
Timing is everything.
Why does this window matter so much?
Because early mitochondrial dysfunction misprogrammes adult physiology.
Flies show chronic starvation signalling, disrupted proteostasis and overwhelmed autophagy—even though adult respiration looks similar in short- and long-lived CIV-depleted flies.
Impair Complex IV during development and flies die dramatically earlier. Apply the same impairment only in adulthood (really late in development), and the effect is modest, even though both groups carry “aged-like” mitochondria that produce more ROS per ATP generated.
We’ve uncovered a fundamental mechanism explaining why short-lived animals are so short-lived.
In Drosophila, mitochondrial respiratory capacity is set during development—and once fixed, cannot be rebuilt in adulthood.
This developmental programming imposes a hard limit on lifespan.
We have updated a previous preprint from our laboratory, and after two additional years of experiments, we now present new findings that fundamentally reshape how we—meaning us, not necessarily everyone—understand ageing.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Excellent work, Payam! Congratulations to you and the entire team on this insightful paper!
Two weeks left to apply for a PhD position in my laboratory at #Glasgow.
The project focuses on #Ageing, #Mitochondria, and #Drosophila, with emphasis on Complex I (CI) function.
Fees are fully covered for applicants eligible for UK Home Student status.
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
There is a PhD Studentship in my laboratory starting in March 2026. Please contact me if you are interested.
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
ROS Signalling, not ROS Damage: A new Paradigm in Ageing youtu.be/yt1kiuOyNtY?... via
@YouTube
#Aging #ROS #Drosophila #Mitochondria
Exciting news! Our most important work is out as preprint!
We suggest sildenafil as a treatment for mitochondrial disease Leigh syndrome, from stem and organoid model to mice and off-label use.
Next step is the clinical trial starting early next year!
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
NAD+ Boosters: Slowing Aging or Selling Hype? youtu.be/0QxzAz9B--Y?... via
@YouTube
#aging #healthyaging #NAD+ #NADH #muscle #supplements #hype
What's Aging? A Survey Among Professionals youtu.be/iX_QUwrHkfY?... via @YouTube #aging #surve #disagreement
NAD+ Boosters: Slowing Aging or Selling Hype? youtu.be/0QxzAz9B--Y?... via
@YouTube
#aging #healthyaging #NAD+ #NADH #muscle #supplements #hype
Age Deceleration and Reversal in C elegans youtu.be/QSmpKDEjYNA?... #aging #worms #celegans #dauer
How does a Fly Die? And why should we care? #Drosophila #Aging #Biology
youtu.be/-akcyD68-eA?...
A concise and excellent summary of our recent
@emboreports.org manuscript, now published in
@natsmb.nature.com.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
