Jan Vijg
Chair, Department of Genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Jan Vijg is the Chair of the Department of Genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Vijg is leading research on the role of non-cancer mutations in aging as it relates to OncoSENS. Formerly Director of the Buck Institute for Aging Research, Dr. Vijg has been an Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholar, holds eight patents in research processes and methodologies, and collaborated in the development of the MutaMouse, the first transgenic model system for the in vivo quantification of somatic mutations in the laboratory mouse.
In the past, his laboratory has generated a transgenic mouse model harboring plasmids containing the bacterial lacZ gene. These plasmids can be recovered from genomic DNA and subsequently transferred into E. coli to positively select for colonies representing a mutant lacZ-plasmid. The ratio of colonies of lacZ mutants over lacZ wildtypes is a measure for the mutation frequency in the mouse. In this way they demonstrated that, as predicted, the frequency of mutations increases with age in most tissues and cell types. Their present work is focused on unraveling the mechanisms through which aging-related mutations are induced and obtaining insight as to how increased genomic instability can give rise to some of the most common aging-related phenotypes.
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Genome dynamics and transcriptional deregulation in aging