Graduate Student Wins Award at AAAS National Meeting

Nancy (Srivastava) Dudek, master's student with Dr. Steve Austad, attended the 167th National Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) held February 16, 2001, in San Francisco and presented a poster entitled "Is there a relationship between telomere length and longevity?" Nancy won Best Poster in the Life Sciences Section of the Student Poster Competition. Co-authors of the poster were Dr. Austad and Dr. Chuck Passavant, Director of the UI Molecular Biology Laboratory. The first place award included a cash prize and a certificate.

For her thesis research, Nancy investigated one of the current ideas about aging that arose out of observations that telomeres, the protective genetic material on the ends of chromosomes, shorten each time a cell divides. This shortening is thought to be involved in some way with cellular aging. The question that Nancy sought to answer was whether there was any evidence that the shortening of telomeres was related to the aging of the whole animal.

If a relationship existed between shortening of telomeres and aging of animals, then one would expect that longer-lived animals would have longer telomeres than animals whose life spans are short. Nancy took tissue samples and measured telomere lengths from seven species of animals with varying longevity. She looked at mice that typically live three years, various bat species whose life expectancies range from eight years up to thirty-four years, and the naked mole rat that can live to be as old as twenty-five. With each species she examined tissues from reproductive organs where cells divide a lot, from the liver where cells divide a little, and from the brain where cells don't divide in the adult animal. Her study revealed no evidence to indicate that telomere shortening is related to the aging process in animals as a whole.