Research Paper Advance Articles
Dynamic and reversible transcriptomic age shifts induced by COVID-19 in Korean whole blood
- 1 Korean Genomics Center (KOGIC), Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan 44919, Republic of Korea
- 2 Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Information-Bio Convergence Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan 44919, Republic of Korea
- 3 Clinomics Inc., Ulsan 44919, Republic of Korea
- 4 Geromics Inc., Suwon 16229, Republic of Korea
- 5 AgingLab, Ulsan 44919, Republic of Korea
- 6 Department of Biological Sciences, College of Information-Bio Convergence Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan 44919, Republic of Korea
Received: July 23, 2024 Accepted: May 26, 2025 Published: June 10, 2025
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.206270How to Cite
Copyright: © 2025 An et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
We developed the first genome-wide transcriptomic clock specific to Korean ethnicity to predict chronological age using whole blood samples from 440 healthy individuals. Our analysis revealed profound age acceleration – up to 21.31 years – during homeostatic disruption in COVID-19 patients, which reverted to baseline upon recovery. These findings highlight the ability of the blood transcriptome to dynamically track reversible changes in age-associated inflammatory responses during infections. Our study underscores the potential of anti-aging interventions in managing infectious diseases.
Abbreviations
ARDS: Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome; BIC: Bayesian Information Criterion; COVID-19: COronaVIrus Disease of 2019; CR: caloric restriction; CRP: C-Reactive Protein; DEG: Differentially Expressed Genes; FDR: False Discovery Rate; HCV: Hepatitis C Virus; HGPS: Hutchinson–Gilford Progeria Syndrome; HLA: Human Leukocyte Antigen; IL-6: InterLeukin-6; KEGG: Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes; KGP: Korean Genome Project; LARS: Least Angle Regression; LASSO: Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator; MAE: Mean Absolute Error; NK: Natural Killer; NREP: Neuronal Regeneration Related Protein; PCA: Principal Component Analysis; RIN: RNA Integrity Number; RSEM: RNA-Seq by Expectation-Maximization; SASPs: Senescence Associated Secretory Phenotypes; STAR: Spliced Transcripts Alignment to a Reference; TAA: Transcriptomic Age Acceleration; t-SNE: t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding; VIS: Virus-Induced Senescence; VSIG4: V-Set And Immunoglobulin Domain Containing 4.