Ageing-associated changes in the expression of lncRNAs in human tissues reflect a transcriptional modulation in ageing pathways

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mad.2019.111177Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Ageing-associated changes in the expression of lncRNAs are highly tissue-specific.

  • Ageing-associated lncRNAs are associated with similar functions across tissues.

  • Ageing-associated changes in lncRNAs mirror those observed for protein coding genes.

Abstract

Ageing-associated changes in the protein coding transcriptome have been extensively characterised, but less attention has been paid to the non-coding portion of the human genome, especially to long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs). Only a minority of known lncRNAs have been functionally characterised; however, a handful of these lncRNAs have already been linked to ageing-associated processes. To gain more information on the effects of ageing on lncRNAs, we identified from GTEx data lncRNAs that show ageing-associated expression patterns (age-lncRNAs) in 29 human tissues in 20-79-year-old individuals.

The age-lncRNAs identified were highly tissue-specific, but the protein coding genes co-expressed with the age-lncRNAs and the functional categories associated with the age-lncRNAs showed significant overlap across tissues. Functions associated with the age-lncRNAs, including immune system processes and transcription, were similar to what has previously been reported for protein coding genes with ageing-associated expression pattern. As the tissue-specific age-lncRNAs were associated with shared functions across tissues, they may reflect the tissue-specific fine-tuning of the common ageing-associated processes. The present study can be utilised as a resource when selecting and prioritising lncRNAs for further functional analyses.

Keywords

Aging
Transcriptomics
lncRNA
ncRNA

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