I don't know if telomerase has been done yet but if you're interested in aging, that would be a big one. Aside from oxidative stress, it's probably one of the few things that really keeps us from living forever.

And it seems to be an accident of evolution that we lose a little bit of our telomeres with each cell division - in addition to the fact that we stop producing telomerase at birth.

Cancer cells generally make their own telomerase.

I'm in favor of having research on ageing. As always, we just lay the foundation for others to be successful in their research about ageing.
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This is definitely an interesting discussion - I'm really quite glad to know that you guys are passionate about what's going on on your resources, and what we're focusing on. A few things came to mind, reading the thread:

First, in the recent past we've tended to be a bit more - how to say - effect agnostic. That is, we're categorically less inclined to focus on a specific "effect," such as aging, than we are to focus on a certain organism or type of organism. I feel that this is because when well chosen, the study of a certain organism (or group of) may span several important or interesting "effects."

A good example are the microbiome bacterial organisms we've been studying. They are known to be very important for human health, digestion, etc, so in targeting them we achieve knowledge toward the very wide-spanning "effect" of bettering human health. We also then learn about bacterial proteins, which are interestingly and importantly different from, for example, mammalian proteins - this further expands our knowledge of the protein landscape in general.

Another example, as mentioned above, is the study of food crops (like rice and arabidopsis, an important model for rice). In studying these organisms, we are learning as much as we can about a resource that is incredibly important to the world, and also broadens our knowledge in the area of plant proteins in general (helps our understanding of plant evolution, structures unique to plants and why they are that way, etc).

I don't mean to get rambling, as is very possible on this topic - I believe there is a subtle distinction that I'm trying to get at between a specific target such as aging, and a general and more spanning target such as "things important to human health," or "the nature of food crops." I know that looks a little laughable, in text, but our goal is more to be broad, and in so doing present experts in very specific areas the important data (protein structure!) that they need to make specific insights into precise topics.

Then again, it is very nice to have a guide for what to analyze - as the first post suggests, studying mole rat and jelly fish would I think be quite wild! Mole rat because I am sure it is quite homologous to other rodent-like mammals, so seeing the distinguishing factors between a common rat and a mole rat could be interestingly indicative of what effects those different factors have; and jelly fish because, well, we haven't done much on organisms like them, and I'm sure they're full of weird stuff we don't deal with very often :-).

It's simply that there is a LOT to do and look at, and prioritizing is tough. Certainly though, we have to tread with care when we choose what to dedicate a great deal of time to, as there are so many important problems out there.

Again, thanks for your discussion and interest - it's definitely got me thinking.

Is Archaea off the table?