Tibor Vellai
Hungarian geneticist who showed in 2003 that silencing the TOR gene roughly doubles the lifespan of the worm C. elegans, and who studies autophagy and ageing in worms at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest
Department of Genetics, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, and HUN-REN-ELTE Genetics Research Group · Department of Biology, University of Fribourg (at the time of the 2003 study, with Fritz Müller)
Tibor Vellai is the first author of VEL2003, a short Nature paper from Fritz Müller's group at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans has a single TOR gene. When the team silenced it, the worms lived about twice as long. This was one of the first signs that turning TOR down can lengthen life in an animal. Because worms and mammals are separated by a very long stretch of evolution, the result suggested that the link between TOR and ageing is ancient. It is a worm study and does not by itself show anything about people.
Vellai went on to lead a genetics group at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest, Hungary. PubMed lists close to a hundred papers with an ELTE or Budapest affiliation under this name, many on autophagy, the cell's recycling system, and its role in ageing in C. elegans. A 2025 paper, for example, describes new single-copy reporter genes that track autophagy in the worm and shows that starvation switches autophagy on only after a delay.
Recent papers list the Department of Genetics at ELTE and the HUN-REN-ELTE Genetics Research Group. No official profile page was opened, so the exact title is not given here.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2003 | A | Genetics: influence of TOR kinase on lifespan in C. elegans VEL2003 First author: showed that silencing the single TOR gene of C. elegans roughly doubles worm lifespan. |
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