Research articles

Griffin et al. present a versatile method for scalable and low-cost sequencing for the construction of epigenetic clocks. They assay 2,892 human or mouse samples, benchmark their method and assess diverse interventions.

Senolytic compounds have shown promise for the treatment of aging-related diseases in animal models. Here, to discover new small molecule senolytics, Wong, Omori and colleagues introduce a graph neural network platform, identify structurally diverse compounds with favorable drug-like properties and confirm one compound’s in vivo activity in aged mice.

Shi, Liu, Gao et al. present a strategy to monitor and selectively eliminate senescent cells in mice during aging through controllable photodynamic therapy, which inhibited the age-related functional decline.

With age, muscle stem cells have been reported to undergo a quiescence-to-senescence switch, thus reducing regenerative capacity. Here, using in vitro and mouse models, Guerrero et al. report that treatment with 3-deazaadenosine alleviates senescence and preserves the regenerative potential of muscle and hematopoietic stem cells.

The authors introduce a high-throughput machine-learning-based visual frailty index for mice that operates on video data from an open-field assay. The machine-vision-based approach extracts various morphometric and behavioral features from video to model frailty score and age.

Senescent cells are typically identified by a combination of senescence-associated markers, and the phenotype is heterogeneous. Here, using deep neural networks, Heckenbach et al. show that nuclear morphology can be used to predict cellular senescence in images of tissues and cell cultures.

Epigenetic clocks are widely used aging biomarkers, but their utility is limited by technical noise. The authors report a method for producing high-reliability clocks for applications such as longitudinal studies and intervention trials.

Age-related cataracts are characterized by clouding of the eye’s lens and cause vision impairment or loss. Here the authors develop a retinal photograph-based deep-leaning method to detect visually significant cataracts and report that it detects cataracts with similar accuracy to ophthalmologists.

Epigenetic clocks emerged as crucial biomarkers of the aging process, but their use has so far been limited to bulk samples. Trapp et al. unveil a new statistical framework that enables epigenetic age profiling at single-cell resolution.

Wang et al. report a mouse model for targeting of cells with high p21 expression. Using this model, they are able to monitor, sort, image, eliminate or modulate these cells in vivo, which could be a valuable tool to study senescent cells.