Rohini V. Khapre
Circadian biologist who did her PhD in Roman Kondratov's lab at Cleveland State University, where she showed that the clock protein BMAL1 acts as a brake on mTORC1 and that feeding times set a daily rhythm in mTORC1 activity
Postdoctoral fellow, Cleveland Clinic (listed by the Kondratov lab; 2016 paper from the Lerner Research Institute) · PhD student, Kondratov lab, Cleveland State University (2009–2014)
The body runs on a roughly 24-hour internal clock, and the protein BMAL1 is one of its core gears. Mice that lack BMAL1 age early and die young. In the Atlas study KHA2014, Khapre and colleagues asked whether this early ageing runs through mTORC1, the growth-control complex that rapamycin blocks. In mouse tissues and in cultured cells without BMAL1, mTORC1 was more active than normal. When Bmal1 knockout mice were given rapamycin, their lifespan rose by about 50 percent. The result places the clock upstream of mTORC1 as a brake, and suggests that losing that brake is part of why these mice age fast. It is a mouse and cell result, not a human one.
A companion paper from the same year, with Khapre as first author, found that mTORC1 activity in mouse tissues rises and falls on a 24-hour rhythm that is set by feeding times, not by light, and keeps going during fasting. The authors proposed that this food-driven rhythm is a second clock that runs alongside the light-driven one. An earlier first-author paper (2011) showed more senescent cells in the tissues of Bmal1 knockout mice and linked BMAL1 to how cells handle oxidative stress.
Khapre trained as a PhD student in Roman Kondratov's lab at Cleveland State University from 2009 to 2014, according to the lab's alumni list. The same list names her current post as a postdoctoral fellow at Cleveland Clinic, and a 2016 paper lists her at the Neuroinflammation Research Center of the Lerner Research Institute there, on a study of memory loss after brain bleeding in mice. No more recent position could be confirmed.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | A | BMAL1-dependent regulation of the mTOR signaling pathway delays aging KHA2014 First author: showed in mice and cells that loss of the clock protein BMAL1 raises mTORC1 activity, and that rapamycin lengthens the life of Bmal1 knockout mice by about 50 percent. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 1
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Rohini V. Khapre.
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- Roman V. Kondratov Showed the circadian clock protein BMAL1 gates TOR/mTOR signaling to control aging, and that calorie restriction's lifespan benefits require a working circadian clock
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