Amazing stuff!
"Studying aging takes time. That’s why neuroscientists studying how brains age turn to thumb-sized fish called killifish. Within just four to six months, the fish hatch, grow to maturity, spawn and die. Their compressed lifespan has made the fish a favorite for research on this inevitable process.
Now, a team ... has created a comprehensive atlas of aging in killifish. By sequencing gene activity across 12 tissues at six life stages in male and female fish, they have documented progressive molecular changes in detail as they unfold across the fish’s body. ...
In humans, immune cells are produced in the bone marrow. In fish, that role falls to the front portion of the kidney. By examining gene activity in this organ, the researchers found a pattern reminiscent of what has been observed in aging mammals, including humans. Markers associated with B and T cells, the immune system’s precision defenders, declined with age. Meanwhile, evidence of immune cells that participate in broader inflammatory responses increased.
Interestingly, this shift was much more pronounced in females than in males. ..."
From the abstract:
"Aging is associated with progressive tissue dysfunction, leading to frailty and mortality. Characterizing aging features, such as changes in gene expression and dynamics, shared across tissues or specific to each tissue, is crucial for understanding systemic and local factors contributing to the aging process.
We performed RNA sequencing on 13 tissues at six different ages in male and female African turquoise killifish, the shortest-lived vertebrate that can be raised in captivity.
This comprehensive, sex-balanced ‘atlas’ dataset revealed varying strength of sex–age interactions across killifish tissues and age-altered genes and biological pathways that are evolutionarily conserved in mice and humans.
We discovered a female-biased myeloid shift with age in the killifish hematopoietic organ, developed tissue-specific ‘transcriptomic clocks’ and identified biomarkers predictive of chronological age.
We showed the importance of sex-specific clocks for selected tissues, validated the tissue clocks with an independent transcriptomic dataset and used them to evaluate different lifespan interventions in the killifish.
Our work provides a comprehensive resource for studying aging dynamics across tissues in the killifish, a powerful vertebrate aging model."
Multi-tissue transcriptomic aging atlas reveals predictive aging biomarkers in the killifish (open access)
Fig. 1: A multi-tissue killifish transcriptomic aging atlas reveals shared and tissue-specific age effects on different tissues.
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