An aging program at the systems level?
Many genes and pathways are known to modulate lifespan in various organisms, but it remains unclear whether there exists a common aging program, and how individual variations of lifespan can occur in an isogenic population. Recent studies on aging regulation at the systems and epigenetic levels point to the possibility of regulating and potentially reversing the aging epigenome and transcriptome, resulting in differential aging status and aging rate in different individuals. Here, the author summarize some of these findings and discuss the possibility of integrating multiple layers of aging regulation at the systems level, to identify an aging program that can explain lifespan variations introduced by environmental and developmental history.
Chinese Academy of Sciences Key laboratory for Computational Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences-Max Planck Partner Institute for Computational Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China. jdhan@picb.ac.cn.
Jing-Dong Jackie
JD
Han
D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D000818:Animals; D017173:Caenorhabditis elegans / Q000502:physiology*; D029742:Caenorhabditis elegans Proteins / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism; D044127:Epigenesis, Genetic; D018507:Gene Expression Regulation, Developmental; D006801:Humans; D049490:Systems Biology
D029742:Caenorhabditis elegans Proteins