A universal transcriptomic signature of age reveals the temporal scaling of Caenorhabditis elegans aging trajectories.

ABSTRACT: We collected 60 age-dependent transcriptomes for C. elegans strains including four exceptionally long-lived mutants (mean adult lifespan extended 2.2- to 9.4-fold) and three examples of lifespan-increasing RNAi treatments. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) reveals aging as a transcriptomic drift along a single direction, consistent across the vastly diverse biological conditions and coinciding with the first principal component, a hallmark of the criticality of the underlying gene regulatory network. We therefore expected that the organism's aging state could be characterized by a single number closely related to vitality deficit or biological age. The "aging trajectory", i.e. the dependence of the biological age on chronological age, is then a universal stochastic function modulated by t

SUBMITTER: Tarkhov AE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6517414 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature