BioProject

Immunosenescence, the age-related decline in immune system function, is a general hallmark of aging. More...

Immunosenescence, the age-related decline in immune system function, is a general hallmark of aging. While much is known about the cellular and physiological changes that accompany immunosenescence, we know very little about the genetic influences on this phenomenon. We used microarrays to determine genome-wide expression profiles in twelve inbred D. melanogaster lines that varied in their ability to to clear an E. coli infection at one and four weeks of age. Overall design: Bacterially infected and sham-injected flies from each of the lines were frozen at -80°C six hours post-injection at one and four weeks of age for use in the microarray study. Lines were chosen to represent the range of changes in age-specific clearance ability: four of the lines chosen exhibited the most dramatic decline in clearance ability with age, four of the lines exhibited the least amount of change in clearance, and the remaining four lines exhibited the most dramatic improvement in clearance ability with age (Please note that the clearance ability of each line was not considered in the microarray data analysis). In this case all of the expression data came from pooling the RNA extracted from individuals from each line (8-15 individuals) at each age from each treatment (sham injected vs. infected). Less...