Skip Navigation


Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on February 2, 2009
Bioinformatics 2009 25(7):875-881; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btp073
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (Print PDF)
Right arrow Supplementary Data
Right arrow Supplementary Data
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
25/7/875    most recent
btp073v1
Right arrow Comments: Submit a response
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me when Comments are posted
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow Search for citing articles in:
ISI Web of Science (2)
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by de Magalhães, J. P.
Right arrow Articles by Church, G. M.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by de Magalhães, J. P.
Right arrow Articles by Church, G. M.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Meta-analysis of age-related gene expression profiles identifies common signatures of aging

João Pedro de Magalhães 1,*,{dagger}, João Curado 2 and George M. Church 1

1Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA and 2Escola Superior de Biotecnologia, 4200 Porto, Portugal

*To whom correspondence should be addressed.


  Abstract

Motivation: Numerous microarray studies of aging have been conducted, yet given the noisy nature of gene expression changes with age, elucidating the transcriptional features of aging and how these relate to physiological, biochemical and pathological changes remains a critical problem.

Results: We performed a meta-analysis of age-related gene expression profiles using 27 datasets from mice, rats and humans. Our results reveal several common signatures of aging, including 56 genes consistently overexpressed with age, the most significant of which was APOD, and 17 genes underexpressed with age. We characterized the biological processes associated with these signatures and found that age-related gene expression changes most notably involve an overexpression of inflammation and immune response genes and of genes associated with the lysosome. An underexpression of collagen genes and of genes associated with energy metabolism, particularly mitochondrial genes, as well as alterations in the expression of genes related to apoptosis, cell cycle and cellular senescence biomarkers, were also observed. By employing a new method that emphasizes sensitivity, our work further reveals previously unknown transcriptional changes with age in many genes, processes and functions. We suggest these molecular signatures reflect a combination of degenerative processes but also transcriptional responses to the process of aging. Overall, our results help to understand how transcriptional changes relate to the process of aging and could serve as targets for future studies.

Availability:http://genomics.senescence.info/uarrays/signatures.html

Contact: jp{at}senescence.info

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

{dagger}Present address: School of Biological Sciences, University of Liverpool, Biosciences Building, Crown St., Liverpool L69 7ZB, UK.

Associate Editor: David Rocke

Received on September 15, 2008; revised on January 11, 2009; accepted on January 31, 2009

Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.