Skip to content

Mitochondrial clonal mosaicism encodes a biphasic molecular clock of aging

Mitochondria are generally regarded as having evolved symbiotically from ancient bacteria and eukaryotic cells. As the energy factories of cells, their genomes are independent.Mitochondria rapidly accumulate mutations throughout a lifetime, potentially acting as a molecular clock for aging and disease.

In this study, researchers profiled mitochondrial RNA across 47 human tissues from 838 individuals, revealing rapid development of clonal mosaicism with two distinct tissue-specific aging signatures. Researchers utilized rare variation identification techniques to conduct in-depth extraction of 11,802 low-frequency variation data of mitochondrial transcriptomes from international public databases (covering 47 types of tissues from 838 individuals), systematically mapping a human tissue-specific mitochondrial mutation map, and revealing the “dual-phase” clock pattern of mitochondrial mutations accumulating with age.

It was proposed that mitochondria encode organ aging through two different modes – random mutation diffusion in proliferative renewal tissues and deterministic damage hotspots in terminally differentiated tissues. In this study, the mitochondrial genome sequencing of 8 cases of testicular tissues was completed by the SURFSeq 5000 platform of GeneMind, achieving the verification of mitochondrial mutation hotspots.

Read           Download