A systems biology approach to studying skeletal muscle ageing

衰老与肌肉力量和耐力(肌肉质量)的丧失有关，这严重损害人们在日常生活中的行动能力。我们对决定人类肌肉质量的因素以及这种质量如何随着年龄的增长而改变的了解，不足以设计出可能实质上保护人们免受功能丧失的具体干预措施。这些干预措施可能是专门的临床物理疗法，包括增强运动过程的设备，它们可能涉及新的药物疗法，通过加速运动的生物效应来促进肌肉功能的改善或加速物理疗法所取得的成果。我们项目的起点是首先通过研究从年轻人和老年人身上获得的肌肉样本来产生与年龄相关的详细过程的知识。我们已经使用一种名为基因芯片的新技术产生了大量数据。基因芯片提供了肌肉组织中开启和关闭的基因的快照，然后我们可以将这些图谱与每个受试者的年龄(身体健康)联系起来。对所有这些数据的分析需要建立新的统计模型来应对其复杂性。对每个人类受试者的研究可以产生6万个数据点，而这种大小的数据集在试图总结结论时会产生新的挑战。我们将为这个项目开发新的方法，这将广泛应用于生物医学界，在那里应用类似的技术来研究癌症和其他重大疾病。

Ageing is associated with loss of muscle strength and endurance (muscle quality) which severely impairs mobility of people in everyday life. Our understanding of what determines muscle quality in humans, and how this is altered as we age is not sufficient to design specific interventions that may substantially protect people from loss of function. These interventions could be specialised clinical physiotherapy which includes devices that enhance the process of exercise and they could involve new drug therapies that promote improved muscle function or accelerate the gains made with physiotherapy by accelerating the biological effects of exercise.The starting point for our project is to first generate detailed knowledge of the age related process by studying muscle samples obtained from younger and older human subjects. We have already produced a lot of data, using a new technology called a gene chip . Gene chips provide a snap-shot of the genes switched on and off in the muscle tissue and we can then relate these profiles to the age (of physical fitness) of each subject. The analysis of all this data requires establishment of novel statistical models to cope with its complexity. The studies of each human subject can produce 60,000 data points and a data set of this size produces new challenges when trying to summarise the conclusions. We will develop new methods for this project which will be of broad use to the biomedical community, where application of similar technology is used to study cancer and other major diseases.