Einstein's Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in Basic Biology of Aging

The Human Multi-Omics Core (HMOC) will continue and significantly expand services provided by our Advanced Genomics of Aging Core (AGAC) in the current grant period. The key objective of the HMOC is to provide support to Einstein Nathan Shock Center (E-NSC) members and facilitate their research efforts to unravel the molecular basis of age-related loss of physiological homeostasis and its genetic control. Our current renewal proposal reflects the advances in the various omics technologies that have been made including some advances in single cell genomics technology made by our own laboratories. In addition to our expertise in omics experimentation, we also leverage our omics data collected over the years from our human Ashkenazi Jewish cohorts of different age levels, including a precious cohort of over 700 centenarians; we are also adding more than 1000 diverse centenarians to be recruited in the next two years. For the HMOC, we will continue to leverage these resources, in conjunction with some of Einstein’s Core facilities, i.e., our Genomics, Epigenomics and Computational Genomics Cores, all operated by the Department of Genetics (Chair, Dr. Vijg, who also directs this Core). The HMOC will not provide actual experimentation except preparation of cell, DNA/RNA samples and limited computational services. This is due to the high costs of omics experimentation, which would allow us to help less than one user per year at our current budget. Instead we will offer the following: (1) access to our human aging cell isolation and repository resource, including cells and DNA/RNA from centenarians; (2) assistance in research design, experimental processing and data analysis for aging- related multi-omics experiments on human plasma, cell and tissue samples; (3) access to our data resources, which includes SNP data and whole exome sequences, of all or part of our centenarians and control cohorts; and (4) access to blood samples as well as muscle and fat biopsies from ongoing aging-related clinical trials of resveratrol, metformin, exercise and acarbose on young and old individuals.