A Conserved Gene Expression Signature of Mammalian Aging

Gene expression changes likely play important roles in aging and could serve as biomarkers of physiological decline and disease, yet age-related gene expression profiles tend to be noisy, making it difficult to identify key genes and processes. In this project, we sought to address this problem by performing a meta-analysis on 127 publicly available microarray and RNA-Seq datasets from mice, rats and humans. By analyzing the combined profiles from these studies we were able to identify common molecular signatures of aging: genes consistently over- or underexpressed with age in multiple mammalian tissues and species. Overall, our work reveals previously unknown transcriptional changes with age and helps paint a better picture of how changes in gene expression relate to the process of aging.

In this page you will find the results derived from our meta-analysis, including the supplementary material, previously described in:

Palmer, D., Fabris, F., Doherty, A., Freitas, A.A., de Magalhães, J.P. (2021) Ageing transcriptome meta-analysis reveals similarities and differences between key mammalian tissues. AGING 13:3313-3341.

This work follows on from the meta-analysis method previously described in:

de Magalhaes, J. P., Curado, J., Church, G. M. (2009) Meta-analysis of age-related gene expression profiles identifies common signatures of aging. Bioinformatics 25:875-881.

Searchable database:

The significant genes from this work are also available as a searchable database. Human gene symbols and names were used where possible.

Supplementary material:

signatures_supplement.zip, zipped file with the meta-profiling results.

Flow diagram of our meta-analysis method

Meta-Analysis of Ageing

Please refer to the Methods section of the paper for additional details.