Our current research is in collaboration with several other Penn State professors interested in developing and examining the usefulness of biomarkers of aging. Reliable biomarkers help gerontologists better understand the various determinants of aging, estimate biological versus chronological age, predict disease and life expectancy, and measure the effects of various interventions on the course of aging.

Our overall study involves a quantitative, genetic, multivariate analysis of many age-related changes in large numbers of both inbred and genetically heterogeneous mice thst are born, raised, and bred in an on-campus barrier facility. Some biomarker measures are destructive and must therefore be done with a cross-sectional design on subpopulations of animals at one time in their lives. Most measures, however, are nondestructive and can be accomplished with a longitudinal design allowing testing at intervals throughout the animals' lives.

Although our laboratory is most interested in age changes related to homeostatic capacity in physiological systems (e.g., glucose tolerance, temperature regulation, water balance, etc.), other investigators are testing from the domains of immunology, free radical biology, neurobiology, extracellar aging, behavior, and pathology. Multivariate analysis of all data examines age-related changes in these biomarker variables and interrelationships among variables, such as the extent to which changes early in life predict subsequent changes. Also, data analysis addresses heritability and gender difference of variables, and relationships between destructive and nondestructive measures. A future goal is to try to identify approximate chromosomal localization of genes (through quantitative trait loci analyses) that influence age-related behavior and physiological, neuroendocrine, immunological, and pathological processes.