Research Paper Volume 10, Issue 4 pp 606—621

Sex differences in transcriptomic profiles in aged kidney cells of renin lineage

Yuliang Wang1,4, , Diana G. Eng2, , Jeffrey W. Pippin2, , Sina A. Gharib5, , Aaron McClelland2, , Kenneth W. Gross3, , Stuart J. Shankland2, ,

  • 1 Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98109, USA
  • 2 Division of Nephrology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98109, USA
  • 3 Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, NY 14263, USA
  • 4 Institute for Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98109, USA
  • 5 Computational Medicine Core, Center for Lung Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98109, USA

Received: March 1, 2018       Accepted: April 10, 2018       Published: April 18, 2018      

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101416
How to Cite

Copyright: Wang et al. This is an open‐access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Renin expressing cells in the kidney’s juxta-glomeruluar compartment likely also serve as progenitors for adult glomerular cells in disease. Although these cells of renin lineage (CoRL) decrease in number with advancing kidney age, accompanied by less responsiveness to typical stimuli such as ACE-inhibition, mechanisms and the impact of sex as a biological variable with age are not known. Accordingly, labeled CoRL were sorted from individual young (2m) and aged (27m) male and female Ren1cCre|ZsGreen reporter mice, and their transcriptomic profiles analyzed by RNA seq. When both aged female and male mice were combined, there were 48 differentially expressed genes (DEG) compared to young mice. However, when compared to their young sex-matched mice, aged female and male mice had 159 and 503 DEGs respectively. In addition to marked differences in individual genes between aged female and male mice, gene ontology analysis showed major pathway differences by sex. The majority of DEGs in one sex did not significantly change or changed in the opposite direction in the other sex. These results show that in CoRL of advanced age, individual genes and gene ontologies change, but differ between female and male mice, highlighting sex related differences the aging process.

Abbreviations

CoRL: Cell of Renin Lineage; DEG: Differentially expressed genes; GO: Gene Ontology; PCA: principal component analysis.