Transcriptomic Aging Clock
A method of precise determination of biological age has been developed
For the first time, German biologists managed to create a method for accurately determining biological age by gene expression – a transcriptome. Scientists have named the new method BiT – binarized transcriptomic aging clock. The results of the study are published in the journal Aging Cell (David H. Meyer, Björn Schumacher, BiT age: A transcriptome‐based aging clock near the theoretical limit of accuracy).
Biological aging is the main factor of many diseases, a decrease in the function of organs and a general progressive loss of the physiological integrity of body systems.
All people age differently, and the biological age can sometimes differ significantly from the chronological one. Therefore, scientists are constantly looking for biomarkers of aging, which can be used to assess the biological age of an organism. This is important for identifying genetic and external factors affecting the aging process, and developing potential methods of rejuvenation and treatment of age-related diseases.
Until now, methods for determining biological age have been based mainly on the analysis of DNA, in the structure of which the degree of methylation changes with age – the attachment of a methyl group to certain genes. Scientists track these so-called epigenetic changes in the genome, or epigenetic DNA tags, and use their set to assess the level of aging of the body.
Researchers from the University of Cologne bioinformatician David Meyer (David Meyer) and geneticist Björn Schumacher (Björn Schumacher) used to estimate the biological age of a transcriptome – a set of genes that are read from DNA during the production of proteins. Previously, it was not possible to develop an accurate aging clock based on gene activity due to the complexity of the method and the ambiguity of the results.
As a model organism for their experiments, the authors used the roundworm nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the lifespan of whose genes is precisely known. By controlling external influences, such as ultraviolet radiation or nutrition, scientists observed how the expression of about 1,000 genes and the total lifespan of the organism changed.
"Surprisingly, this simple procedure made it possible to predict biological age very accurately, close to the theoretical limit," Professor Bjorn Schumacher, director of the Institute for Genome Stability in Aging and Diseases and the Center for Molecular Medicine of Cologne, is quoted in a university press release. "What is very important is that these aging clocks work well in old age, which used to be difficult to measure, because fluctuations in gene activity in old age are especially high."
The researchers believe that the BiT method can also be used to quickly and very accurately assess a person's biological age.
"Since the BiT method is based solely on the activity of genes, it can be applied to any organism. The measurement of biological age is important to determine the influence of the environment, diet or treatment on the aging process and the development of age-related diseases. Thus, these watches can be widely used in gerontological research," the scientist says.
The authors managed to achieve high accuracy of the transcriptomic clock of aging by using a mathematical technique that eliminates differences in the activity of genes, which they divided into two groups – "on" and "off", and analyzed the variability in each group separately.
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