David Sinclair (biologist)

David Andrew Sinclair
Born	Sydney
Nationality	Australian
Fields	biology, aging
Institutions	Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging at Harvard Medical School
Influenced	Rozalyn Anderson

David Andrew Sinclair (born June 26, 1969 in Sydney) is an Australian biologist and Professor of Genetics best known for his research on the biology of lifespan extension and driving research towards treating diseases of aging.

Sinclair is codirector of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging at Harvard Medical School. Sinclair obtained a Bachelor of Science (Honours Class I) at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and received the Australian Commonwealth Prize. In 1995, he received a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics, then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Leonard Guarente.

Since 1999 he has been a tenured professor in the Genetics Department of Harvard Medical School.

One of Sinclair's discoveries was in the lab of Leonard Guarente where he identified the key role of extrachromosomal rDNA circles or "ERCs" in determining the lifespan of yeast. Subsequent research showed that ERCs are unique to aging in a particular yeast strain, and not involved in aging in any other organisms. ERCs were subsequently shown to be suppressed by the SIR2 gene, the founding member of the sirtuin gene family, as well as deletion of the FOB1 gene. With Kevin Mills and Lenny Guarente, he also showed that the Sir2 protein relocalizes to DNA breaks and mediates repair. These two discoveries led his lab to discover that genomic instability induces changes in gene regulation that may drive the aging process in mammals.

In 2002, Sinclair's lab at Harvard discovered a key role of NAD⁺ biosynthesis in aging. In 2003, his lab published that nicotinamide is a non-competitive inhibitor of Sir2 and SIRT1, and proposed the molecule as a physiological regulator of Sirtuins.

...
Wikipedia