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Science Saturday: Mayo Clinic study reveals aging speeds genomic mutations in brain
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Somatic mutations naturally occur in cells throughout human development and during aging. However, it has yet to be determined whether the frequency of somatic mutations in the population are a contributing factor to the cause of neuropsychiatric disorders, cancers, and various diseases.
Alexej Abyzov, Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic genomics researcher, seeks to gain a better understanding of genomic variants so that one day it will be possible to identify individual genetic risks in diseases, monitor these risks during a person’s lifetime, personalize medical treatment and improve therapy.
In a study released in Science, Mayo Clinic researchers analyzed the somatic variants in 131 human brains. The analysis included 44 neurotypical brains, 19 with Tourette syndrome, nine with schizophrenia, and 59 with an autism spectrum disorder.
Researchers highlighted the following findings:
- While most studied brains had just a few dozen mutations of likely developmental origin in proliferating cells, greater than or equal to 6% of brains were classified as hypermutable, in which mutation is abnormally frequent.
- Hypermutability was not related to disease but did increase with age, reaching at least a 3% population frequency for brains over 40 years old.
- Somatic duplications, likely arising during development, were found in greater than or equal to 5% of normal and diseased brains, reflecting the background production of genetic mutations.
- Half of the hypermutable brains studied in this work carried mutations in genes involved in clonal hematopoiesis in aging adults, consistent with previous observations from the analysis of a panel of genes. Clonal hematopoiesis is a common aging-related blood disorder.
“We found a subset of mutations seems to be in hypermobility,” says Dr. Abyzov, lead author. “Given the association of hypermutability with age and its frequent localization in one brain region, we hypothesized that it could be related to gliogenesis in adult brains.”
Read the rest of the article on the Center for Individualized Medicine blog.
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Other Mayo Clinic medical research websites:
- Research at Mayo Clinic
- Discovery’s Edge
- Advancing the Science
- Mayo Clinic Laboratories
- Forefront
- Center for Regenerative Biotherapeutics
- Center for the Science of Health Care Delivery
- Mayo Clinic Cancer Center
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