Aging & Longevity

The genus Myotis is one of the largest clades of bats, and it exhibits some of the most extreme variation in lifespans among mammals, alongside unique adaptations to viral tolerance and immune defence^(1-3). Here, to study the evolution of these phenotypes, we generated cell lines and near-complete genome assemblies for eight closely related Myotis species. Using genome-wide screens of positive selection, analyses of structural variation and functional experiments in primary cells, we identify...

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Age-associated hematopoietic skewing results in an increase in the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio, which serves as a strong predictor of all-cause mortality in older adults, although its causes are incompletely understood. Here we show that cytotoxic CD4^(+) T lymphocytes accumulate in the bone marrow of mice during aging and induce myelopoiesis, increasing the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio. T cell receptor-dependent induction of mitochondrial stress and activation of STING upregulates the...

The associations between objectively measured sleep patterns, the hallmarks of aging, and their shared proteomic signatures remain poorly understood. In this study, we utilized wrist-worn accelerometer data, plasma proteomic profiles, and health records from the UK Biobank to examine the associations between six defined sleep patterns and nine established hallmarks of aging. We further identified proteins jointly associated with both sleep patterns and aging hallmarks. Longer total sleep...

Genotoxic stress induced by cancer therapies is increasingly recognized as a driver of accelerated aging in long-term cancer survivors, yet the mechanisms responsible for the emergence of age-related dysfunction months to years after treatment remain poorly understood. Here, we use sublethal whole-body irradiation as a model of systemic genotoxic stress to test whether senescent cells contribute to the progression of post-therapy age-related dysfunction and whether the benefits of senescent cell...

Sarcopenia is the age-related progressive decline in both skeletal muscle mass and function. It acts as an exacerbator of multimorbidity, engaging in bidirectional pathological cycles with multiple chronic diseases, and contributes substantially to increased mortality, disability and healthcare costs. Current nutritional support is often limited by a generic one-size-fits-all approach that fails to account for substantial inter-individual variation across genetics, metabolism, lifestyle, gut...

CONCLUSIONS: CNN-derived masseter muscle parameters from magnetic resonance imaging were inversely correlated with oral impairment in older adults. This approach enables scalable and objective oral phenotyping from imaging data and highlights its potential application in large-scale epidemiological studies of aging and functional decline.

Skin aging is a multifactorial, multiscale process driven by the interplay between intrinsic cellular decline and extrinsic environmental exposures. Increasing evidence positions the skin as a dynamic interface and sensitive "window" reflecting systemic aging. However, research remains fragmented across scales, and existing models fail to capture the full complexity of systemic regulation. In this review, we introduce a hierarchical four-dimension framework of skin aging to systematically...

Aging is associated with progressive cardiac dysfunction, characterized by increased myocardial fibrosis, chronic inflammation, and impaired myocardial structure. Exercise is a well-established, cost-effective intervention for age-related cardiovascular decline, yet the underlying epigenetic mechanisms remain to be fully elucidated. Recent studies have implicated histone lactylation as a regulatory mark that modulates macrophage polarization and inflammatory responses. Histone lactylation, a...

The musculoskeletal system is key to aging. Nonetheless, existing protein-based musculoskeletal aging clocks have limited predictive performance and fail to characterize genetic or environmental determinants. We first constructed a musculoskeletal protein pool by integrating transcriptomic enrichment, protein functional annotation, and literature expertise. Two musculoskeletal aging clocks-MSKAge and MSKAgeMort-were then developed using proteomic data of 21,070 UK Biobank participants....

Longevity science has advanced faster than the public's capacity to interpret it. Biological age tests, longevity clinics, and consumer wearables now reach millions of people, yet no shared framework exists to tell an individual what those numbers mean or what to do about them. Cardiovascular medicine encountered a comparable problem and resolved it not with a new therapeutic but with a communication instrument: Life's Essential 8, which distilled a contested risk landscape into eight components...

Dementia reflects vascular and neurodegenerative processes in late life, yet studies often examine risks and outcomes individually. This study tested whether the cumulative burden of risks relate to vascular brain injury and cognitive performance and whether brain markers are associated with part of these associations through cross-sectional indirect pathways. Cross-sectional data were drawn from 38,414 older adults in the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center database. A composite index...

Reprogramming resident glia into neurons holds great therapeutic promise for neurodegenerative diseases across the central nervous system, yet these strategies have been developed largely in young animals. Because aging is the primary risk factor for neurodegeneration, whether glia-to-neuron reprogramming remains effective in aged tissue is a critical unanswered question. Here, using the retina as an accessible part of the central nervous system, we show that aging is a major barrier to...

Carbon molecular sieve (CMS) membranes represent a high-performance alternative to polymers, surpassing the trade-off limits between permeability and selectivity typically seen in conventional polymeric membranes. Their efficacy stems from a precise molecular sieving mechanism, enabling exceptional gas separation performance. However, a challenge persists in fine-tuning their microporous structure to achieve effective kinetic separation of gas molecule pairs with small differences in kinetic...

The accumulation of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations is a primary driver of mitochondrial dysfunction, which is intrinsically linked to aging and various pathologies. POLG, the catalytic subunit of DNA polymerase gamma, is essential for mtDNA replication; notably, a deficiency in its proofreading function precipitates the accumulation of mtDNA mutations. In this study, by combining prime editing with somatic cell nuclear transfer technology, we successfully generated a mitochondrial mutator...

CONCLUSION: Elastic principal trees represent cognitive-performance profiles as connected branches and provide a graph-ordering coordinate unavailable from ordinary discrete clustering. The results are exploratory, cross-sectional, and non-diagnostic and should not be generalized to neurodegenerative aging without older, clinically characterized, longitudinal cohorts. Among the examined alternatives, the original full-feature six-PC solution was retained for interpretation because the...

Protein aggregation and proteostasis decline are central features of aging and neurodegenerative disease, arising from progressive impairment of protein quality-control systems and transitions into aggregation-prone states. During aging, diverse proteins, including metabolic and proteostasis-related factors, gradually accumulate in aggregated forms as proteostasis capacity declines. Although these aggregates often remain compatible with cellular function, increasing aggregate burden...

Aging is a primary risk factor for chronic diseases, yet its progression varies among individuals and between sexes. Here, under the X-Age Project, we profiled the clinical aging phenome of the Multicentric Chinese Aging Study (mCAS) through a cross-sectional analysis of 172 clinical measures from more than 100,000 participants aged 18-98 years across three centers. These profiles enabled sex-specific clinical aging clocks that revealed divergent aging trajectories between women and men during...

Aging-associated inflammation is a driver of multiple age-associated diseases. Cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS) contributes to inflammaging by responding to endogenously-derived cytoplasmic DNA in aged cells. Although cGAS-knockout (KO) mice are viable, their aging has not been characterized. Unexpectedly, we found that cGAS KO mice exhibit an accelerated-aging phenotype, with induction of inflammation in multiple organs. cGAS KO mice display shortened median lifespan and increased frailty...

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