Activation of Inflammation and Metabolic Networks in Age-related Thymic Involution.

Genetic modeling of thymic involution has demonstrated the importance of individual inflammatory pathways affecting the thymic microenvironment, particularly thymic epithelial cells (TEC). We studied the pathogenic processes in chronological aging of the murine thymus. We used microarrays to elucidate the global gene expression and to identify a leading edge subset of age-associated genes in TEC. Analyses of the TEC transcriptome demonstrated altered expression associated with inflammatory and fatty acid metabolism. TECs were FACS sorted from different age of mice (6 weeks, 7 months and 15 months old) for RNA extraction and hybridization on Affymetrix microarrays. Each cohort sample derived from 3-5 mice.