Table 1.

Types of age-related molecular damage and approaches to its assessment.

Class of molecule or process	Type of damage	Measurement
RNA	Transcriptional errors and RNA editing errors	RNAseq and whole genome or whole exome sequencing
	Splicing errors	RNAseq
Metabolites	By-products of metabolism	Targeted and untargeted metabolite profiling
	Exogenous molecular species	Targeted and untargeted metabolite profiling
Proteins	Post-translational modifications	Mass-spectrometry
Genome	Structural damage	Genome sequencing
	Somatic mutations	Single cell genome sequencing
	Clonal expansions	Clonality assays
	mtDNA heteroplasmy	Mitochondrial genome sequencing
Epigenome	Hypomethylation, hypermethylation of DNA	Whole genome bisulfite sequencing, reduced representation bisulfite sequencing, DNA methylation arrays
Autophagy failure	Decreased clearance of damaged molecules and organelles	Quantification of lipofuscin granules
		Proteomics