Blood and facial photos track organ aging and senescence scores in humans

In a preprint analyzing human datasets, researchers developed transcriptomic clocks to infer organ biological age and cellular senescence from blood samples and facial images. Using paired whole-blood and tissue RNA sequencing data from the GTEx project, the team constructed tissue-specific aging clocks. They observed high variability in aging signatures across organs and in how accurately blood transcriptomes predicted organ age. Organ clocks were dominated by biological processes that differed across tissues, while multi-organ network analyses supported a role for systemic signaling in coupling organ aging. The researchers also derived tissue-specific senescence and hallmark scores from gene sets and inferred them from blood. Finally, they evaluated blood methylation and facial photographs as proxies for these blood-organ scores in cohorts from Edifice Health, the Health and Retirement Study, the Framingham Heart Study, and the IMDB-WIKI dataset, finding associations with mortality.