Investigating the Role of Ku70 and Ku86 Acetylation

Our proposal on Ku70 and Ku86 acetylation aimed to explore the role of these acetylations on several cellular mechanisms. Within these - telomere maintenance, repair of DNA of double strands via Non-homologues End Joining and apoptosis especially by exploring our knowledge on the role of Ku70 acetylation on Bax mediated Cell death. In our two years of collaboration and the successive years, we were able to identified new acetylation sites on Ku80 and explore their role in DNA repair. These findings have important contribution for our understanding of the role of acetylation as tumor suppressor. In a second project we investigated the role of SIRT6 in aging. We Showed that in the absence of SIRT6, mice develops metabolic defects and retinal degradation similar to the observed phenotypes in elderly human. We believe that these findings have great therapeutic potential in future development of drugs aiming to treat age related diseases.