Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University have developed Pasta, a new tool that estimates the biological age of individual cells by analysing patterns of gene activity. The tool can also help identify substances and biological pathways that may accelerate or slow cellular ageing.

To develop Pasta, researchers analysed gene activity data from more than 17,000 healthy human tissue samples and tested the model across multiple independent datasets. Unlike previous biological age tools, Pasta is designed to work across different tissues, cell types, and laboratory techniques.

The researchers found that cells with a higher biological age showed increased activity in genes associated with DNA damage and cellular stress. The tool could also distinguish older, senescent cells from more youthful, stem cell-like cells.

Using more than three million publicly available gene profiles, the team further identified drugs, genetic changes, and signalling pathways that appeared to influence cellular biological age. Several findings were subsequently confirmed in laboratory experiments using human cells.

The researchers believe Pasta could provide a widely applicable way to study the mechanisms of ageing and accelerate the search for genes and compounds that may influence the ageing process.

Source: https://news.ki.se/new-tool-measures-the-biological-age-of-cells