Analysis of Sex-Dependent Gene Expression in Human Aging

Presenter: Amel Hilmi

Faculty Sponsor: Maryclare Griffin

School: UMass Amherst

Research Area: Mathematics and Statistics

Session: Poster Session 4, 2:15 PM - 3:00 PM, Auditorium, A68

ABSTRACT

Aging is accompanied by widespread molecular changes throughout the human body. Identifying age-associated biomarkers may provide insight into mechanisms underlying age-related disease. Chronic low-grade inflammation, also known as inflammaging, is a recognized hallmark of aging; however, limitations on human research have made it difficult to directly understand inflammaging processes in humans. While inflammaging is recognized as a systemic feature of aging, it remains unclear how inflammatory gene expression patterns differ between males and females across human tissues. Sex-specific differences in immune regulation have been observed in both human and murine studies, yet the extent to which aging-associated inflammatory pathways exhibit sexually dependent transcriptional signatures in humans is not well defined. Various murine studies have revealed of sex-dependent effects of gene expression changes related to aging, such as elevated levels of IL-6r, IL-18, and CRP in women, all of which are associated with cardiovascular and metabolic risk. Consequently, there is an emergent need for identification of sex-related inflammaging biomarkers. Factors such as ethical constraints and tissue collection pose further barriers in identifying these markers; these restraints can be circumvented through the use of open source gene expression data, such as the GTEx data used in this project. We hypothesize that aging is positively associated with systemic  and tissue-dependent changes in expression, with inflammatory pathways exhibiting sex-dependent transcriptional patterns that contribute to distinct trajectories of aging between males and females.

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