Proteogenomic characterization of age and sex interactions in cardiac gene expression

Abstract

The risks of heart diseases are significantly modulated by biological age and sex, but how these factors influence baseline cardiac gene expression remains incompletely understood. Here we characterized young adult and early aging mouse hearts using proteogenomics to identify age and sex dependent gene expression signatures in the mouse heart. RNA sequencing from 4 months old and 20 months old female and male C57BL/6J hearts identified thousands of genes with differential transcript abundances both between sexes (male vs. female) and across age groups (20 mo. vs. 4 mo.). Sex-associated cardiac genes are broadly distributed, functioning in the TCA cycle, mitochondrial translation, autophagy, and other processes. In addition, we found over 800 genes with differential aging response between male and female, which are enriched in calmodulin signaling and cell cycle regulations. Comparison with mass spectrometry data shows a cluster of metabolism genes with up-regulated transcripts but down-regulated protein levels in aging hearts, consistent with an uncoupling of transcriptional regulations in the genetic program with protein compositions. An analysis of sex-adjusted aging cardiac transcriptomes further revealed widespread remodeling of exon usage patterns that is largely independent from differential gene expression, concomitant with upstream changes in RNA-binding protein and splice factor transcripts. To evaluate the potential impact of the splicing events on proteoform composition in the heart, we applied an RNA-guided-proteomics computational pipeline to analyze the mass spectrometry data, and putatively identified hundreds of splice events with the potential to rewire the cardiac proteome through producing detectable splice isoform specific peptides. Taken together, this study contributes to emerging evidences for considerable sexual dimorphism in the cardiac aging process involving sex-biased aging genes and regulatory networks. Aging hearts are associated with a rewiring of RNA splicing programs, including sex- and age-dependent changes in exon usages and splice patterns that have the potential to influence cardiac protein structure and function. These changes represent an under-investigated aspect of cardiac aging that should be considered in the search for disease mechanisms.