GENE-GENE INTERACTION ASSOCIATIONS WITH FRAILTY TO IDENTIFY CORE GENES OF AGING AND THEIR BIOLOGICAL CONTEXT
Frailty is the accumulation of health deficits as one ages, and is a highly complex, composite measure of one’s aging health. Frailty Indices (FIs) integrate multiple processes, tissues, molecular pathways, and systems across the body, and include both genetic and environmental risk factors. Efforts to identify genes that influence frailty have elucidated some but operate under an unrealistic assumption that genes act in isolation, missing those genes that interact with other genes across molecular pathways and networks and in different biological systems. Dr. Evans will apply a new and efficient approach he developed to exhaustively test all pairwise gene-gene interactions for association with frailty index measures. The aim of this work is to detect ‘core’ genes that interact with many others and integrate signals from multiple molecular pathways, and identify the biological context (the tissues, cell types, pathways, and systems) in which these genes effects’ influence (un)healthy aging.
