Aging fly atlas reveals cellular-level view of aging over the life of a model organism

Tzu-Chiao Lu, Maria Brbic and colleagues have completed the Aging Fly Cell Atlas, a single-nucleus transcriptome map of the Drosophila melanogaster fly as it ages. Aging is known to be a risk factor for many diseases across many animals including humans, but understanding how the process affects cell composition and different cell types is still mostly unknown, making the new atlas a valuable reference in further studies. Lu et al. used single-nucleus RNA sequencing to generate the Fly Cell Atlas that profiles the Drosophila head and body tissues at five, 30, 50 and 70 days, covering the lifespan trajectory of the fly. (A 70-day old fly is the estimated equivalent of an 80 to 90-year-old human.) The researchers characterized 850,000 nuclei in 163 different cell types and tracked aging changes in gene expression, the cellular composition of tissues, and cell identities. Different cells display very different aging patterns, they conclude. One of the more dramatic changes in the fly is a significant increase in fat body nuclei and a decrease in muscle nuclei with age, they found. Lu et al. also developed aging clock models to predict a fly’s age from the transcriptomic data.