Figures

- Aging and Gene Expression in the Primate Brain

The seven regions—anterior cingulate cortex, Broca's area, caudate nucleus, cerebellum, frontal pole, prefrontal cortex, and primary visual cortex—are indicated in red.

The abbreviations used are as follows: ACC, anterior cingulate cortex; BA, Broca's area; C, cerebellum; CN, caudate nucleus; PFC, prefrontal cortex; PVC, primary visual cortex.

(A) Correlations of aging gene expression patterns between human frontal pole [7] and each of the six regions of the human brain from [19] (from left to right, number of genes used are 656, 733, 684, 710, 690, and 603). The strong correlation for all four cerebral cortex samples indicates a reproducible aging pattern across all tested regions of cortex; this pattern does not hold for caudate nucleus or cerebellum.

(B) Correlations of aging gene expression patterns between human prefrontal cortex [20] and each of the six regions of the human brain from [19] (from left to right, number of genes used are 704, 832, 697, 784, 759, and 674). The strong correlations for all four cortex samples indicates a reproducible aging pattern across all tested regions of cortex but not caudate nucleus or cerebellum, confirming the result of (A).

(C) Correlations of aging gene expression patterns between cerebellum [20] and each of the six regions of the brain from [19] (from left to right, number of genes used are 213, 241, 204, 241, 244, and 204). The lack of any significant correlation, even when comparing the two cerebellum aging patterns to each other, suggests that human cerebellum lacks a reproducible aging pattern.

Average expression levels (base two logarithm expression intensity; error bars indicate plus or minus one standard error) in prefrontal cortex were calculated for four sets of genes in both young (two 45-y-old) and old (one 70-y-old) human samples. Red indicates cortex expression levels; blue, cerebellum expression levels; solid lines, genes down-regulated in frontal pole; and dashed lines, genes up-regulated in frontal pole (connecting lines are not meant to imply linear changes in gene expression with age). The genes up-regulated with age in cortex are somewhat up-regulated in cerebellum, whereas those down-regulated in cortex do not change at all with age in cerebellum.

The abbreviations used are as follows: ACC, anterior cingulate cortex; C, cerebellum; PFC, prefrontal cortex.

(A) Correlations of aging gene expression patterns between all three possible pairs of the three regions of the chimpanzee brain used in this work (from left to right, number of genes used are 1,343, 2,235, and 1,328). The strong correlation when comparing cortex regions indicates a reproducible pattern of aging in chimpanzee cortex.

(B) Correlations of aging gene expression patterns between human frontal pole [7] and each of the three regions of the chimpanzee brain used in this work (841 genes used in each comparison). The lack of any significant correlation suggests that human and chimpanzee brain aging patterns differ.

Average expression levels (base two logarithm expression intensity; error bars indicate plus or minus one standard error) in prefrontal cortex were calculated for four sets of genes in both young (two 45-y-old human, or five 7- to 12-y-old chimpanzee) and old (one 70-y-old human, or two older than 40-y-old chimpanzee) samples. Red indicates human genes; blue, chimpanzee genes; solid lines, genes (or orthologs of genes) down-regulated in human frontal pole; and dashed lines, genes (or orthologs) up-regulated in human frontal pole (connecting lines are not meant to imply linear changes in gene expression with age). The chimpanzee expression levels resemble young, but not old, human.