Lauren N. Jackson

Researcher in Robin Mockett's lab at the University of South Alabama who showed that rapamycin's effect on fruit fly lifespan swings from harmful to helpful depending on the food

Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of South Alabama (at the time of the 2026 study)

Lauren Jackson is the first author of JAC2026, a GeroScience paper from Robin Mockett's lab at the University of South Alabama. Rapamycin, which blocks mTORC1, is often described as a drug that lengthens life in many animals. This fruit fly (Drosophila) study tested that claim carefully across five fly strains, both sexes and two kinds of food.

The answer depended on the diet. On a cornmeal and torula yeast food, rapamycin shortened life in 19 of 26 experiments. On a richer brewer's yeast food it helped in 8 experiments, made no difference in 14, and never caused clear harm. Changes in median lifespan ranged from a 51 percent loss to a 5 percent gain and varied with sex and strain. Rapamycin was also toxic to developing flies at higher doses. The lesson for a reader is that a lifespan result in one lab, on one food, may not carry over to other conditions. It is a fly study, so it says nothing direct about people.

PubMed shows only this paper under this name with Mockett, and no official profile was found, so the position shown is the affiliation on the Atlas paper.

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