Profiling the Metabolic Signature of Senescence

Aging is a complex process, which involves changes in different cellular functions that all can be integrated on the metabolite level. This means that different gene regulation pathways that affect aging might lead to similar changes in metabolism and result in a metabolic signature of senescence. In this chapter, we describe how to establish a metabolic signature of senescence by analyzing the metabolome of various longevity mutants of the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Since longevity-associated genes exist for other model organisms and humans, this analysis could be universally applied to body fluids or whole tissue samples for studing the relationship between senescence and metabolism.