Research Paper Volume 17, Issue 1 pp 170—202

Age-invariant genes: multi-tissue identification and characterization of murine reference genes

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Figure 1. Visual diagram of article contents. (A) Bulk RNA-seq data from 17 murine tissues (GSE132040) were sequentially filtered through 7 criteria. The funnel is a visual depiction of the filtering process. Steps 1–4 are adapted from previous publications. We added criteria filters 5 and 6 to ensure low variation and no correlation with age. Criteria filter 7 was validation of low variation and no age correlation, performed in a second dataset for 11 of the 17 tissues. The filtering strategy resulted in 9 pan-tissue age-invariant genes (gene box). (B) Sample gender, age and life stage distributions of the samples in the dataset. A full table of samples can be found in Supplementary Table 10. (C) Classical reference genes are not applicable to all tissues in an aging context but age-invariant genes introduced here are. (D) Tissue aging-invariant genes are enriched to different extents for gene ontology terms associated with hallmarks of aging. Age-invariant genes have low enrichment in some (e.g. epigenetic alterations GO terms) and high enrichment in others (e.g. loss of proteostasis GO terms). Created with https://www.biorender.com/.