The Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, United States.
Harvard Medical School, Boston, United States.
Elife. 2021 Mar 9;10:e62585. doi: 10.7554/eLife.62585.
Little is known about the molecular changes that take place in the kidney during the aging process. In order to better understand these changes, we measured mRNA and protein levels in genetically diverse mice at different ages. We observed distinctive change in mRNA and protein levels as a function of age. Changes in both mRNA and protein are associated with increased immune infiltration and decreases in mitochondrial function. Proteins show a greater extent of change and reveal changes in a wide array of biological processes including unique, organ-specific features of aging in kidney. Most importantly, we observed functionally important age-related changes in protein that occur in the absence of corresponding changes in mRNA. Our findings suggest that mRNA profiling alone provides an incomplete picture of molecular aging in the kidney and that examination of changes in proteins is essential to understand aging processes that are not transcriptionally regulated.
关于衰老过程中肾脏发生的分子变化知之甚少。为了更好地理解这些变化，我们在不同年龄的遗传多样性小鼠中测量了 mRNA 和蛋白质水平。我们观察到随着年龄的增长，mRNA 和蛋白质水平呈现出明显的变化。mRNA 和蛋白质的变化都与免疫浸润增加和线粒体功能下降有关。蛋白质的变化程度更大，揭示了广泛的生物学过程的变化，包括肾脏衰老的独特的器官特异性特征。最重要的是，我们观察到在没有相应 mRNA 变化的情况下，蛋白质发生了与功能相关的重要年龄相关性变化。我们的研究结果表明，仅进行 mRNA 谱分析不能完整地描述肾脏的分子衰老，因此检查蛋白质的变化对于理解非转录调控的衰老过程是必不可少的。
