Figure 1. An elt-3 Transcriptional Circuit for Aging.
(A) Shown are the log2 average expression levels of 1254 age-regulated genes during aging, normalized to expression on day 4. Rows show age-regulated genes and columns at different aging time points (days of adulthood). Full data showing genes and experimental values for this figure can be found in Table S3. The expression results from this aging time course show a Pearson correlation of 0.429 with results from a similar DNA microarray experiment on aging previously by Lund et al., indicating that the two experiments were generally similar (Table 1A) (Lund et al., 2002). Full DNA microarray data set can be found at http://cmgm.stanford.edu/∼kimlab/elt3/index.html.
(B) A GATA regulatory element that is significantly enriched in the upstream regions of the age-regulated genes was identified using the CompareProspector program (Liu, 2005).
(C) elt-3(RNAi) treatment specifically suppresses the life span extension of daf-2(e1370) mutants (p < 0.001).
(D) Expression of elt-3::GFP declines with age in a tissue-specific manner. Shown are adult animals 3 days and 12 days after adulthood. The GFP images were merged with Nomarski images.
(E) Expression levels of elt-3::GFP during aging were calculated by measuring pixel intensity from GFP images using ImageJ. The y axis denotes GFP expression (arbitrary units), and the x axis denotes days of adulthood. Average expression and SD from 20 animals are shown.