Hao Lab
Principal Investigator: Nan Hao
Institution: University of California San Diego (La Jolla, CA)
Primary Subfield: Genetics/Genomics
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary Synthetic biology offers transformative technologies for constructing or rewiring gene networks to create novel biological functions. However, the rational engineering of complex biological traits remains very challenging. To address this, we propose to integrate synthetic biology and computational modeling to engineer cellular aging, an intricate, multifaceted biological process crucially related to various diseases, including cancers and neurodegenerative disorders. In this proposal, we choose to focus on replicative aging of budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a genetically tractable model for aging of mitotic cells in mammals, such as stem cell. We previously found that genetically-identical yeast cells age through two distinct routes with different molecular and cellular changes. About half of the cells age with chromatin silencing loss, leading to nucleolar decline, whereas the other half age with heme depletion, resulting in mitochondrial deterioration. We further revealed that the fate decision and commitment to the two aging paths are governed by a core gene circuit comprised of the lysine deacetylase Sir2 and heme-activated protein (HAP) transcriptiona…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01AG086348-03: Engineered genetic clocks for control of cellular aging (2026)
- 5R01AG056440-09: Network-Driven Dynamics of Replicative Aging (2026)
- 5R01AG093633-11: Dynamical signaling and gene regulation in stress and aging (2026)
- 5R01GM144595-04: Reprogramming cell-fate decisions through predictive modeling and synthetic biology (2025)
- 9R01AG093633-10A1: Dynamical signaling and gene regulation in stress and aging (2025)
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