Liver Age Tool Released
The authors have released LivAge, an open tool for assessing the age of mouse livers based on gene activity. On August 21, an article about LivAge was published in Aging Cell. The tool receives RNA-seq results and provides an estimate of the mouse liver age in months. The authors have also made the calculation code available.
In aging experiments, it can be difficult to determine whether a diet, medication, or genetic modification affects tissue condition, as the passport age of the control and experimental groups may be the same, and differences in lifespan may take a long time to become apparent. LivAge reduces a large table of gene activity to a single indicator that can be used to compare groups.
The authors trained the model on 432 liver samples from healthy C57BL/6 mice from 23 studies. The age of the animals ranged from one to 30 months, and only control groups without genetic modifications or interventions were included. The algorithm selected 268 genes whose joint activity determines the liver age estimate. The final test was conducted on 134 samples from four other studies that were not used for training and model tuning.
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