Abstract
It is an open question whether aging-related changes throughout the brain are driven by a common factor or result from several distinct molecular mechanisms. Quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (qMRI) provides biophysical parametric measurements allowing for non-invasive mapping of the aging human brain. However, qMRI measurements change in response to both molecular composition and water content. Here, we present a tissue relaxivity approach that disentangles these two tissue components and decodes molecular information from the MRI signal. Our approach enables us to reveal the molecular composition of lipid samples and predict lipidomics measurements of the brain. It produces unique molecular signatures across the brain, which are correlated with specific gene-expression profiles. We uncover region-specific molecular changes associated with brain aging. These changes are independent from other MRI aging markers. Our approach opens the door to a quantitative characterization of the biological sources for aging, that until now was possible only post-mortem.
Original language | American English |
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Article number | 3403 |
Journal | Nature Communications |
Volume | 10 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1 Dec 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by the ISF grant 0399306, awarded to A.A.M. We acknowledge Ady Zelman for the assistance in collecting the human MRI data. We thank Assaf Friedler for assigning research lab space and advising on the lipid sample experiments. We thank Inbal Goshen for assigning research lab space and advising on the protein and ion samples as well as the porcine brain experiments. We thank Magnus Soderberg for advising on histological data interpretation. We are grateful to Brian A. Wandell, Jason Yeatman, Hermona Soreq, Ami Citri, Mark Does, Yaniv Ziv, Ofer Yizhar, Shai Berman, Roey Schurr, Jonathan Bain, Asier Erramuzpe Aliaga, Menachem Gutman, and Esther Nachliel for their critical reading of the manuscript and very useful comments. We thank Prof. Alicia Leikin-Frenkel for her guidance with the TLC analysis. We thank Rona Shaharabani for guidance and support in the post-mortem experiments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, The Author(s).