Programmed aging refers to the idea that senescence in humans and other organisms is purposely caused by evolved biological mechanisms in order to obtain an evolutionary advantage. Until recently, programmed aging was considered theoretically impossible because of the mechanics of the evolution process and medical research was based on the idea that aging was not programmed. Theorists struggled...

Apoptosis is a highly organized physiologic mechanism of destroying injured and abnormal cells as well as maintaining homeostasis in the multicellular organism. Apoptosis is tightly controlled at the genetic level and dysregulation of the apoptosis machinery may contribute to a variety of diseases. Pharmacologic manipulation of this pathway is a novel therapeutic target.

We study the problem of the self-assembly of nanoparticles (NPs) into finite mesoscopic structures with a programmed local morphology and complex overall shape. Our proposed building blocks are NPs that are directionally functionalized with DNA. The combination of directionality and selectivity of interactions allows one to avoid unwanted metastable configurations, which have been shown to lead...

Erythrocytes are produced by a complex and finely regulated process of erythropoiesis. It starts with a pluripotential stem cell that, in addition of its self replication capacity, can give rise to separate cell lineages. Erythropoiesis passes from the stem cell through the multipotent progenitor CFU-GEMM (colony-forming unit granulocyte erythroid monocyte and megakaryocyte), and then BFU-E (bu...

Errors that alter the reading frame occur extremely rarely during translation, yet some genes have evolved sequences that efficiently induce frameshifting. These sequences, termed programmed frameshift sites, manipulate the translational apparatus to promote non-canonical decoding. Frameshifts are mechanistically diverse. Most cause a -1 shift of frames; the first such site was discovered in a ...