Open-access atlas reveals molecular mechanisms of aging in roundworms

The new ageing atlas will provide scientists with a detailed view of how individual cells and tissues in the worm age, and how the ageing process can be halted by various lifespan-extending strategies.

Aging affects every tissue in the body, from muscle to skin. Understanding how individual tissues and cells age can help researchers better understand the aging process and potentially aid in the development of anti-aging treatments.

Many researchers have studied aging in C. elegans due to their short life span, simple body size, and genetic similarity to humans. To study aging at the tissue and cellular levels, a team of researchers from HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus, Baylor College of Medicine, and Creighton University School of Medicine profiled gene expression in individual cells of adult C. elegans at different times during the aging process. They also profiled a lineage of long-lived C. elegans.

The researchers compiled their results into a complete transcriptome cellular atlas of aging in C. elegans, an open-access atlas that enables scientists to examine which genes are expressed in every cell of the worm simultaneously, and how gene expression changes over time, in both wild-type and long-lived worms.

The researchers used the atlas to develop tissue-specific “aging clocks” – predictive models to characterize aging signatures specific to different tissues – and used these clocks to better understand anti-aging mechanisms in long-lived nematode lineages.

The researchers also generated the first germ cell fate trajectory map that tracks how germ cells develop over time, enabling them to discover age-related changes in cellular composition and gene expression at different germ cell stages.

This atlas enabled the team to look at polyadenylation, a key mechanism of gene regulation and protein diversification with age, throughout the worm, and they found a series of age-associated changes in these events in different cell types, suggesting a previously unknown link between this mechanism and ageing.

Not only will the new findings give researchers insight into aging at a molecular level, but the new open-access atlas and its accompanying user-friendly data portal will also serve as a resource for other researchers.