ABSTRACT – CORE A The overall goals of the Administrative Core of the Program Project Grant (PPG) are to provide general scientific, programmatic and fiscal leadership, facilitate lines of communication between the different researchers involved in the PPG, maintain coherence in the PPG's overall and long-range goals, coordinate data analysis and sharing, monitor human subjects issues and issues related to the use of vertebrate animals, and ensure that resources resulting from the PPG will benefit the scientific community. In the context of the above, the tasks of this Core include effective coordination of activities in the four Research Projects and the Bioinformatics Core to best achieve the overall goal of elucidating the mechanisms through which DNA damage drives important aspects of aging and age-related diseases and how certain genome maintenance genotypes found associated with extreme human longevity can preserve genome integrity over longer periods of time. Well-coordinated activities of the Projects and Cores will promote the mobilization of new human data sources and analysis techniques that will allow us to more specifically test the functional impact of DNA damage and its various end points, providing computational and statistical services to all members of the PPG as needed and providing access by the scientific community to the PPG's resources, information and technologies through the internet.