measuring-single-cell-aging-with-an-imaging-based-biomarker-chromatin

Measuring Single-Cell Aging with an Imaging-based Biomarker of Chromatin and Epigenetic Aging

To advance personalized healthcare and assess potential rejuvenation strategies, biomarkers reflecting biological age are crucial. We have introduced ...

The University of Western Australia

Scintillon Institute

For efficient, cost-effective and personalized healthcare, biomarkers that capture aspects of functional, biological aging, thus predicting disease risk and lifespan more accurately and reliably than chronological age, are essential. We developed an imaging-based chromatin and epigenetic age (ImAge) that captures intrinsic age-related trajectories of the spatial organization of chromatin and epigenetic marks in single nuclei, in mice. We show that such trajectories readily emerge as principal changes in each individual dataset without regression on chronological age, and that ImAge can be computed using several epigenetic marks and DNA labeling. We find that interventions known to affect biological aging induce corresponding effects on ImAge, including increased ImAge upon chemotherapy treatment and decreased ImAge upon caloric restriction and partial reprogramming by transient OSKM expression in liver and skeletal muscle. Further, ImAge readouts from chronologically identical mice inversely correlated with their locomotor activity, suggesting that ImAge may capture elements of biological and functional age. In sum, we developed ImAge, an imaging-based biomarker of aging with single-cell resolution rooted in the analysis of spatial organization of epigenetic marks.

Article	Year
ImAge quantitates aging and rejuvenation. Nature aging\| PubMed ID: 39210148	2024
Author Correction: ImAge quantitates aging and rejuvenation. Nature aging\| PubMed ID: 40764433	2025

Alexey V. Terskikh

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