John T González, Kyra Thrush, Margarita Meer, Morgan E Levine, Albert T Higgins-Chen
Studies of the aging transcriptome focus on genes that change with age. But what can we learn from age-invariant genes-those that remain unchanged throughout the aging process? These genes also have a practical application: they serve as reference genes (often called housekeeping genes) in expression studies. Reference genes have mostly been identified and validated in young organisms, and no systematic investigation has been done across the lifespan. Here, we build upon a common pipeline for identifying reference genes in RNA-seq datasets to identify age-invariant genes across seventeen C57BL/6 mouse tissues (brain, lung, bone marrow, muscle, white blood cells, heart, small intestine, kidney, liver, pancreas, skin, brown, gonadal, marrow, and subcutaneous adipose tissue) spanning 1 to 21+ months of age...
April 13, 2024: bioRxiv