title: Synchronized age-related gene expression changes across multiple tissues in human and the link to complex diseases.
abstract: Aging is one of the most important biological processes and is a known risk factor for many age-related diseases in human. Studying age-related transcriptomic changes in tissues across the whole body can provide valuable information for a holistic understanding of this fundamental process. In this work, we catalogue age-related gene expression changes in nine tissues from nearly two hundred individuals collected by the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project. In general, we find the aging gene expression signatures are very tissue specific. However, enrichment for some well-known aging components such as mitochondria biology is observed in many tissues. Different levels of cross-tissue synchronization of age-related gene expression changes are observed, and some essential tissues (e.g., heart and lung) show much stronger "co-aging" than other tissues based on a principal component analysis. The aging gene signatures and complex disease genes show a complex overlapping pattern and only in some cases, we see that they are significantly overlapped in the tissues affected by the corresponding diseases. In summary, our analyses provide novel insights to the co-regulation of age-related gene expression in multiple tissues; it also presents a tissue-specific view of the link between aging and age-related diseases.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.|Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.
authors.forename: Jialiang
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.|Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.
authors.forename: Tao
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.|Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.
authors.forename: Francesca
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Petralia
authors.affiliation: Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.|Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.
authors.forename: Quan
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Long
authors.affiliation: Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.|Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.
authors.forename: Bin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.|Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.
authors.forename: Carmen
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Argmann
authors.affiliation: Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.|Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.
authors.forename: Yong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.|Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.|Department of Medicine, Endocrinology, Diabetes and Bone Disease, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.
authors.forename: Charles V
authors.initials: CV
authors.lastname: Mobbs
authors.affiliation: Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.|Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.
authors.forename: Eric E
authors.initials: EE
authors.lastname: Schadt
authors.affiliation: Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.|Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.
authors.forename: Jun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.|Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, 10029, USA.
authors.forename: Zhidong
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Tu
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000235:genetics*; D000818:Animals; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D005260:Female; D015870:Gene Expression; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation; D056726:Genetic Association Studies; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D051379:Mice; D008875:Middle Aged; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D009154:Mutation; D009928:Organ Specificity / Q000235:genetics; D055815:Young Adult