Longevity Briefs: Large epigenetic study on skeletal muscle aging: new frontiers

Longevity briefs provides a short summary of a novel research, medicine, or technology that caught the attention of our researchers in Oxford, due to its potential to improve our health, wellbeing, and longevity.

Why is this research important: Ageing usually leads to a muscle and strength loss, which results in a disorder called sarcopenia. Sarcopenia in turn leads to increased risks of cancer, diabetes type 2 and cardiovascular diseases. This process is driven by molecular changes in human skeletal muscles, therefore understanding of genomic changes is crucial.

What did the researchers do: In this article, researches have conducted epigenome wide-association study of age in human skeletal muscles from 10 studies. Epigenome analysis is different from classical genome one, by studying how genes are expressed, when they switched on/off, rather than what genes are found in participant’s genome.

Key takeaway(s) from this research: Researches have identified possible 9,986 affected (methylated) regions in DNA. They also find out that age-affected regions are not randomly spread across the genome, but rather abundant in specific regions. This provides a great base for future studies focused on a better understanding of skeletal aging.

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