New insights into aging-associated characteristics of female subcutaneous adipose tissue through integrative analysis of multi-omics data

Abstract

ABSTRACT Aging could be critical in limiting the application of subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) in tissue repair and reconstruction. However, no systematic study on the characteristics of SAT aging has been conducted. In this study, a scanning electronic microscope was used to detect the structural and compositional changes of SAT collected from nine females in three age groups. Multi-omics data of SAT from 37 females were obtained from Gene Expression Omnibus database, and 1860 genes, 56 miRNAs, and 332 methylated genes were identified as being differentially expressed during aging among non-obese females. Using Weighted Correlation Network Analysis (WGCNA), 1754 DEGs were defined as aging-associated genes for non-obese females, distributed among ten co-expression modules. Through Gene Ontology enrichment analysis and Gene Set enrichment analysis on those aging-associated DEGs, SAT aging was observed to be characterized by variations in immune and inflammatory states, mitochondria, lipid and carbohydrate metabolism, and regulation of vascular development. SUPV3L1, OGT, and ARPC1B were identified as conserved and core SAT-aging-related genes, as verified by RT-qPCR among 18 samples in different age groups. Multi-omics regulatory networks of core aging-associated biological processes of SAT were also constructed. Based on WGCNA, we performed differential co-expression analysis to unveil the differences in aging-related co-expression patterns between obese and non-obese females and determined that obesity could be an important accelerating factor in aging processes. Our work provides a landscape of SAT aging, which could be helpful for further research in fields such as repair and reconstruction as well as aging.