Amy Vandiver, MD, PhD

Chimeric mitochondrial transcripts: a novel metric of aging in RNA-sequencing data

Mitochondria generate the majority of a cell’s energy. They contain many copies of a small genome to facilitate this. Large deletion mutations in the mitochondrial genome accumulate with aging and predict age-related functional changes, however they are challenging to identify in many accessible data sets. This limitation has prevented evaluation of these events as metrics of aging in large human studies and identification of functional associations. Dr. Vandiver’s team recently identified products of these deletions, chimeric mitochondrial RNAs (ch-mtRNAs), which can be easily measured in publicly available large datasets. In the proposed work, Dr. Vandiver will apply this method to publicly available data from 480 samples to determine the relationship between ch-mtRNAs, age and tissue function in twelve tissues. The data generated will establish the utility of this metric for further work and clarify the consequences of age-associated mitochondrial genome deletions.