Project description:Aging causes a functional decline in tissues throughout the body that may be delayed by caloric restriction (CR). However, the cellular profiles and signatures of aging, as well as those ameliorated by CR, remain unclear. Here, we built comprehensive single-cell and single-nucleus transcriptomic atlases across various rat tissues undergoing aging and CR. CR attenuated aging-related changes in cell type composition, gene expression, and core transcriptional regulatory networks. Immune cells were increased during aging, and CR favorably reversed the aging-disturbed immune ecosystem. Computational prediction revealed that the abnormal cell-cell communication patterns observed during aging, including the excessive proinflammatory ligand-receptor interplay, were reversed by CR. Our work provides multi-tissue single-cell transcriptional landscapes associated with aging and CR in a mammal, enhances our understanding of the robustness of CR as a geroprotective intervention, and uncovers how metabolic intervention can act upon the immune system to modify the process of aging.
Project description:The normal aging process is a complex phenomenon associated with physiological alterations in the function of cells and organs over time. Although an attractive candidate for mediating transcriptional dysregulation, the contribution of epigenetic dysregulation to these progressive changes in cellular function remains unclear. In this study, we employed the genome-wide HELP assay to define patterns of cytosine methylation throughout the rat genome, and the LUMA assay to measure global levels of DNA methylation in the same samples. We studied both liver and visceral adipose tissue, and demonstrated significant differences in DNA methylation with age at >5% of sites analyzed. Furthermore, we showed that epigenetic dysregulation with age is a highly tissue-dependent phenomenon. The most distinctive loci were located at intergenic sequences and conserved non-coding elements, and not at promoters nor at CG-dinucleotide dense loci. Finally, we demonstrated that changes in methylation occur consistently near genes that are involved in metabolism and metabolic regulation, implicating their potential role in the pathogenesis of age-related diseases. We conclude that different patterns of epigenetic dysregulation occur in each tissue over time and may cause some of the physiological changes associated with normal aging. Direct comparison of DNA methylation in 18 samples belonging to four groups: young liver (n=6), young adipose tissue (n=4), old liver (n=5), old adipose tissue (n=3), isolated from F344*BN rats (young at ~3 months, old at ~18 months). Each microarray consists of a two-color comparison of a methylation-sensitive representation of the genome (HpaII) with an internal methylation-insensitive control/reference (MspI).