BioProject

Dietary interventions are effective ways to extend or shorten lifespan. By examining midlife hepatic gene expressions in mice under different dietary conditions, which resulted in different lifespans and aging-related phenotypes, we were able to identify genes and pathways that modulate the aging process. More...

Dietary interventions are effective ways to extend or shorten lifespan. By examining midlife hepatic gene expressions in mice under different dietary conditions, which resulted in different lifespans and aging-related phenotypes, we were able to identify genes and pathways that modulate the aging process. We found that pathways transcriptionally correlated with diet-modulated lifespan and physiological changes were enriched for lifespan-modifying genes. Overall design: Male C57BL/6J mice at 4 weeks of age were purchased from Shanghai Animal Co, Ltd. Mice were maintained under a 12-hour dark/light cycle (lights on at 6:30 am) at a temperature of 22 ± 3 °C in accredited animal facilities. Prior to the start of experiment, mice were maintained on a low-fat diet (Research Diets Inc., New Brunswick, NJ) for one week. At the age of 5 weeks, animals were randomly assigned to one of the 6 intervention groups (n = 30 for each group): feeding of a low-fat diet (10% fat, D12450B, Research Diets) ad libitum (LF) or with 30% calorie restriction (LF+CR) or with voluntary running exercise (LF+Ex), feeding of a high-fat diet (60% fat, D12492, Research Diets) ad libitum (HF) or with 30% calorie restriction (HF+CR) or with voluntary running exercise (HF+Ex). All mice were housed individually during the study. The daily consumption of food in LF and HF groups was recorded over a week and averaged to determine the amount of food for the following week for the LF+CR and HF+CR groups, respectively. After 1 week acclimation in cage with the locked running wheels, mice in the LF+Ex and HF+Ex groups were allowed free access to a running wheel, and the running distance and time were recorded automatically by the equipment. The hepatic transcriptional level for 3 mice from each intervention group at 62 weeks of age was analyzed using Affymetrix Mouse Genome 430 2.0 Arrays. Less...