Insilico Identification of Genes and Molecular Pathways during Aging in Drosophila Brain

Abstract

The regulation of gene expression in brain vicissitudes during aging is still not much known and explored. Differential gene expression and regulation is a key factor involved to identify the important landmarks within the brain transcriptome to study neuronal aging. Recently, transcriptomic studies are highly explored to understand and depict diseased versus normal as next generation sequencing enables to capture the complete biological context to the entire genome. Study of gene expression during aging compared to young flies provides a signature and scenario of gene expression and regulation during aging. In this study, we took advantage of NGS raw data of young and old flies head from SRA database of NCBI and decrypted the gene expression regulation during normal aging in drosophila model. We identified 350 genes with significant differential expression between young and old flies having 0.01% FDR. Various pathways in context to identified genes which are involved in aging include autophagy i.e. cell death and apoptosis, proteolysis, oxidative stress, declination grey and white matter and neurotransmitter levels, mitochondrial discrepancy, electron transport chain, sugar degradation pathways, activation of transcription factors involved in epigenetic changes, regulators involved in negative and positive regulation WNT signaling pathways, G protein coupled receptor etc. as all these factors contribute to neurodegeneration and possibly dementia in normal aging. So, to find the specific genes and regulators which are differentially expressed in normal aging, we investigate brain transcriptome of normal aging flies compared to young flies which offer a repertoire of genes, regulators and factors involved in network of neurodegeneration to establish direct correlation between aging and dementia. We also identified the pathways which are involved in aging and corresponding gene regulation in these pathways in aging flies brain. It is found that there are some common pathways whose genes and regulators are highly differentially regulated in both aging and dementia.