Background: Progressive neurological dysfunction is a key aspect of human aging. Because of underlying differences in the aging of mice and humans, useful mouse models have been difficult to obtain and study. We have used gene-expression analysis and polymorphism screening to study molecular senescence of the retina and hippocampus in two rare inbred mouse models of accelerated neurological senescence (SAMP8 and SAMP10) that closely mimic human neurological aging, and in a related normal strain (SAMR1) and an unrelated normal strain (C57BL/6J). Results: The majority of age-related gene expression changes were strain-specific, with only a few common pathways found for normal and accelerated neurological aging. Polymorphism screening led to the identification of mutations that could have a direct impact on important disease processes, including a mutation in a fibroblast growth factor gene, Fgf1, and a mutation in and ectopic expression of the gene for the chemokine CCL19, which is involved in the inflammatory response. Conclusions: We show that combining the study of inbred mouse strains with interesting traits and gene-expression profiling can lead to the discovery of genes important for complex phenotypes. Furthermore, full-genome polymorphism detection, sequencing and gene-expression profiling of inbred mouse strains with interesting phenotypic differences may provide unique insights into the molecular genetics of late-manifesting complex diseases. Keywords: disease state analysis
Overall design
Gene-expression profiling was performed on 3 month-old (young), 16 month-old (old) S8, S10 and SR1 mice. Two independent samples for each time point were used in gene-expression profiling for each strain. Because of greater replicate variability, three samples were used for hippocampus of 16-month SAM mice. A 10.0 ug sample of total RNA was used to generate labeled cRNA for each sample according to recommended protocols (Affymetrix). RNA from multiple animals was not pooled, except in the case of retina, where the retinas of two mice were combined to generate sufficient total RNA.
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