Transcriptome profiling of the aging fly brain

Cognitive decline is a common occurrence of the natural aging process in animals, and studying age-related changes in gene expression in the brain might shed light on disrupted molecular pathways that play a role in this decline. The fruit fly is a useful neurobiological model for studying aging due to its short generational time and relatively small brain size. We investigated age-dependent changes in the Drosophila melanogaster whole-brain transcriptome by comparing 5-, 20-, 30- and 40-day-old flies of both sexes. We used RNA-Sequencing of dissected brain samples followed by differential expression, temporal clustering, co-expression network and gene ontology enrichment analyses. Our study provides the first transcriptome profile of aging brains from fruit flies of both sexes, and it will serve as an important resource for those who study aging and cognitive decline in this model. Overall design: 24 biological sample replicates (3 per age per sex), each consisting of pooled dissected whole-brains from 18 flies, were processed for total RNA extraction and sequencing. Age groups were 5, 20, 30 and 40 days old. One sample from the 30-day-old male group had to be removed from analysis due to sample contamination.

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Pacifico R, MacMullen CM, Walkinshaw E, Zhang X, Davis RL