Department of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.
Integr Comp Biol. 2010 Nov;50(5):844-54. doi: 10.1093/icb/icq094. Epub 2010 Jul 12.
Aging affects a myriad of genetic, biochemical, and metabolic processes, and efforts to understand the underlying molecular basis of aging are often thwarted by the complexity of the aging process. By taking a systems biology approach, network analysis is well-suited to study the decline in function with age. Network analysis has already been utilized in describing other complex processes such as development, evolution, and robustness. Networks of gene expression and protein-protein interaction have provided valuable insight into the loss of connectivity and network structure throughout lifespan. Here, we advocate the use of metabolic networks to expand the work from genomics and proteomics. As metabolism is the final fingerprint of functionality and has been implicated in multiple theories of aging, metabolomic methods combined with metabolite network analyses should pave the way to investigate how relationships of metabolites change with age and how these interactions affect phenotype and function of the aging individual. The metabolomic network approaches highlighted in this review are fundamental for an understanding of systematic declines and of failure to function with age.
衰老是一个涉及到众多基因、生化和代谢过程的问题，而要理解衰老的根本分子基础，往往会受到衰老过程的复杂性的阻碍。通过采用系统生物学方法，网络分析非常适合研究随年龄增长而出现的功能下降问题。网络分析已经被用于描述其他复杂过程，如发育、进化和稳健性。基因表达和蛋白质-蛋白质相互作用网络为研究整个生命周期中连接性和网络结构的丧失提供了有价值的见解。在这里，我们提倡利用代谢网络来扩展基因组学和蛋白质组学的工作。由于代谢是功能的最终表现形式，并且与多种衰老理论有关，因此代谢组学方法与代谢物网络分析相结合，应该能够探索代谢物之间的关系如何随年龄变化，以及这些相互作用如何影响衰老个体的表型和功能。本文综述中强调的代谢组网络方法对于理解系统衰退和功能随年龄丧失至关重要。
