Research Perspective|Volume 5, Issue 10|pp 782—788

Aging on a different scale – chronological versus pathology-related aging

Joost P.M. Melis^1,², Martijs J. Jonker^3,⁴, Jan Vijg⁵, Jan H.J. Hoeijmakers⁶, Timo M. Breit^3,⁴, Harry van Steeg^1,²

¹National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), Center for Health Protection, Bilthoven, the Netherlands
²Leiden University Medical Center, Department of Toxicogenetics, Leiden, the Netherlands
³University of Amsterdam (UvA), MicroArray Department & Integrative Bioinformatics Unit (MAD-IBU), Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences (SILS), Faculty of Science (FNWI), Amsterdam, the Netherlands
⁴Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre (NBIC), Nijmegen, the Netherlands
⁵Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Department of Genetics, New York, USA
⁶Erasmus University Medical Center, CGC Department of Genetics, Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Received: September 5, 2013Accepted: October 16, 2013Published: October 16, 2013

Copyright: © 2013 Melis et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

In the next decades the elderly population will increase dramatically, demanding appropriate solutions in health care and aging research focusing on healthy aging to prevent high burdens and costs in health care. For this, research targeting tissue-specific and individual aging is paramount to make the necessary progression in aging research. In a recently published study we have attempted to make a step interpreting aging data on chronological as well as pathological scale. For this, we sampled five major tissues at regular time intervals during the entire C57BL/6J murine lifespan from a controlled in vivo aging study, measured the whole transcriptome and incorporated temporal as well as physical health aspects into the analyses. In total, we used 18 different age-related pathological parameters and transcriptomic profiles of liver, kidney, spleen, lung and brain and created a database that can now be used for a broad systems biology approach. In our study, we focused on the dynamics of biological processes during chronological aging and the comparison between chronological and pathology-related aging.