Whitehead Institute Member Yukiko Yamashita has received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to explore the importance of maintaining ribosomal DNA repeats in the “immortality” of germ cells, which pass the genome on to an organism’s progeny. Yamashita’s work on this fundamental question of life could open whole new paths for mitigating the cell-aging process—and could lead to new treatments for cancer, which may hijack the germline’s mechanism of immortality.
