In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Morgan Levine from Altos lab to talk about her work on Epigenetic Clocks and Biomarkers of Ageing.

The Levine Lab focuses on deciphering mechanisms that lead to epigenetic ageing, which can be measured by epigenetic clocks. Epigenetic clocks were first described in 2011 by Bocklandt et al.. Later-on, the Horvath and the Hannum clock were described by using a combination of CpGs to calculate biological/epigenetic age in contrast to chronological age.

The Levine Lab themselves worked on generating an advanced version of an Epigenetic clock, called "DNAm PhenoAge" that will now be used, and not only in human samples. The team now moves to mouse models and to cells in a dish and using those models to investigate the mechanisms behind epigenetic aging.

References

Liu, Z., Leung, D., Thrush, K., Zhao, W., Ratliff, S., Tanaka, T., Schmitz, L. L., Smith, J. A., Ferrucci, L., & Levine, M. E. (2020). Underlying features of epigenetic aging clocks in vivo and in vitro. Aging cell, 19(10), e13229. https://doi.org/10.1111/acel.13229

Levine, M. E., Lu, A. T., Quach, A., Chen, B. H., Assimes, T. L., Bandinelli, S., Hou, L., Baccarelli, A. A., Stewart, J. D., Li, Y., Whitsel, E. A., Wilson, J. G., Reiner, A. P., Aviv, A., Lohman, K., Liu, Y., Ferrucci, L., & Horvath, S. (2018). An epigenetic biomarker of aging for lifespan and healthspan. Aging, 10(4), 573–591. https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101414

Levine, M., McDevitt, R. A., Meer, M., Perdue, K., Di Francesco, A., Meade, T., Farrell, C., Thrush, K., Wang, M., Dunn, C., Pellegrini, M., de Cabo, R., & Ferrucci, L. (2020). A rat epigenetic clock recapitulates phenotypic aging and co-localizes with heterochromatin. eLife, 9, e59201. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.59201

Kuo, C. L., Pilling, L. C., Atkins, J. C., Masoli, J., Delgado, J., Tignanelli, C., Kuchel, G., Melzer, D., Beckman, K. B., & Levine, M. (2020). COVID-19 severity is predicted by earlier evidence of accelerated aging. medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences, 2020.07.10.20147777. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.10.20147777

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Aging and Epigenetics (Peter Tessarz)

Epigenetic Mechanisms of Aging and Longevity (Shelley Berger)

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