Research Paper|Volume 16, Issue 7|pp 5796—5810

Evidence of a pan-tissue decline in stemness during human aging

Gabriel Arantes dos Santos^1,², Gustavo Daniel Vega Magdaleno³, João Pedro de Magalhães²

¹Laboratory of Medical Investigation (LIM55), Urology Department, Faculdade de Medicina FMUSP, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo 01246 903, Brazil
²Genomics of Ageing and Rejuvenation Lab, Institute of Inflammation and Ageing, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2WB, United Kingdom
³Institute of Life Course and Medical Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L7 8TX, United Kingdom

Received: October 8, 2023Accepted: February 2, 2024Published: April 4, 2024

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.205717

Copyright: © 2024 Santos et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Despite their biological importance, the role of stem cells in human aging remains to be elucidated. In this work, we applied a machine learning methodology to GTEx transcriptome data and assigned stemness scores to 17,382 healthy samples from 30 human tissues aged between 20 and 79 years. We found that ~60% of the studied tissues exhibit a significant negative correlation between the subject's age and stemness score. The only significant exception was the uterus, where we observed an increased stemness with age. Moreover, we observed that stemness is positively correlated with cell proliferation and negatively correlated with cellular senescence. Finally, we also observed a trend that hematopoietic stem cells derived from older individuals might have higher stemness scores. In conclusion, we assigned stemness scores to human samples and show evidence of a pan-tissue loss of stemness during human aging, which adds weight to the idea that stem cell deterioration may contribute to human aging.