Expression data from seven rat tissues at multiple ages

Aging progress is distinctly characterized by systematic and progressive decline of physiological functions with increasing age in virtually all tissues or organs. Addressing the patterns of molecular changes in different tissues and how different tissues interact with each other during aging are an important question in aging. This study sampled seven tissues at four ages in rats to measure genome-scale gene expression, which allows global insight into coordination, specificity and/or commonness among different tissues with aging progress. We sampled seven different tissues or organs of male Sprague Dawley rats including hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal gland, spleen lymphocytes, liver, kidney, and bone at successive ages of 4, 10, 18, and 24 months. For each age, ten individual rats were obtained, seven tissues from each individual rat were isolated, 5µg of each extracted RNA sample of the same tissue from ten individual rats was equally mixed, and then a total amount of 15 µg RNA from this mixture was hybridized to an Affymetrix RAE230A GeneChip.