Genome-wide Methylation Profiles Reveal Quantitative Views of Human Aging Rates

Overview

Journal Mol Cell

Publisher Cell Press

Specialty Cell Biology

Date 2012 Nov 27

PMID 23177740

Citations 1822

Authors

Gregory Hannum

Justin Guinney

Ling Zhao

Li Zhang

Guy Hughes

SriniVas Sadda

Brandy Klotzle

Marina Bibikova

Jian-Bing Fan

Yuan Gao

Rob Deconde

Menzies Chen

Indika Rajapakse

Stephen Friend

Trey Ideker

Kang Zhang

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

The ability to measure human aging from molecular profiles has practical implications in many fields, including disease prevention and treatment, forensics, and extension of life. Although chronological age has been linked to changes in DNA methylation, the methylome has not yet been used to measure and compare human aging rates. Here, we build a quantitative model of aging using measurements at more than 450,000 CpG markers from the whole blood of 656 human individuals, aged 19 to 101. This model measures the rate at which an individual's methylome ages, which we show is impacted by gender and genetic variants. We also show that differences in aging rates help explain epigenetic drift and are reflected in the transcriptome. Moreover, we show how our aging model is upheld in other human tissues and reveals an advanced aging rate in tumor tissue. Our model highlights specific components of the aging process and provides a quantitative readout for studying the role of methylation in age-related disease.

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