Age-related alterations in Wnt-signaling in paneth and stem cells isolated from intestinal crypts.

Purpose: Characterize functional alterations in stem cells and paneth cells obtained from young and aged mice, focusing on age-based impairment of intestinal regeneration due to a decline in canonical Wnt signaling.Methods: mRNA profiles of young and aged stem and paneth cells were generated in triplicate (with one additional young paneth sample) using the Illumina HiSeq 2500. Reads that passed quality filters were aligned to the mm10 mouse genome with annotations provided by UCSC.Results: Approximately 10 millions reads were aligned per sample, corresponding to 36186 transcripts -- of these, 19574 exhibited reasonable expression. The effect of age was tested wtihin paneth and stem cells, using unpaired t-tests with a p-value cutoff of 0.05 and fold change cutoff of 1.5. Within paneth cells, 1025 genes were significant; within stem cells, 750 genes exhibited differential regulation. Among the downregulated genes in paneth and stem cells, we observed significant enrichment of canonical Wnt signaling genes.Conclusion: Age-related downregulation of canonical Wnt signaling is involved in the impairment of intestinal regulation upon aging.