Vered Raz
Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands
Title: Studying onset and progression of molecular aging in RNA expression profiles
Biography
Biography: Vered Raz
Abstract
Genome-wide expression profiles are altered during biological aging and can describe an age-associated molecular regulation of tissue degeneration. Using a time-dependent regression models in transcriptome datasets we can extract onset and progression of aging. Currently, onset and progression of aging in humans is poorly understood. We developed a novel methodology to study the progression of molecular aging by studying age-associated trends of RNA expression profiles. The methodology is robust and overcomes technical variations between datasets. Moreover, with this methodology the critical age from which most changes initiate can be extracted. By analyzing 8 independent cross-sectional transcriptome studies from various human tissues, we show that molecular aging is significant in only a subset of tissues while others are spared. Within the tissues with significant molecular aging, the earlier critical age, at the forth decade, was found in skeletal muscles and brain cortex, whereas in blood and kidney cortex a critical age is found only at the sixth decade. Moreover, molecular signatures also differ between tissues. Our data suggests that the complex architecture of molecular aging in humans is in part owed to the initially affected molecular pathways differ between tissues and different progression between tissues.