==== Front
Innov Aging
Innov Aging
innovateage
Innovation in Aging
2399-5300 Oxford University Press US 

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.3145
igaa057.3145
Abstracts
Session 7705 (Symposium)
AcademicSubjects/SOC02600
Biological Heterogeneity
Rogina Blanka  
UConn Health, Farmington, Connecticut, United States
2020 
16 12 2020 
16 12 2020 
4 Suppl 1 Program Abstracts from The GSA 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting “Turning 75: Why Age Matters”854 855
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.2020This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract
Studies of aging in invertebrates, mammalian animal models and humans have demonstrated increasing heterogeneity with aging in terms of varied facets of biological aging. In addition to growing heterogeneity, aging is also associated with qualitative and quantitative changes involving DNA methylation captured in epigenetic clocks of aging which seek to predict chronological and biological aging. Increased heterogeneity with aging is also evident in terms of posttranslational histone modification, gene expression, somatic clonal expansion, and increased degree of tissue mosaicism. Senescent cells accumulating with aging demonstrate significant heterogeneity. For example, while most studies targeting senescent cells have focused on cells expressing p16 (CDKN2A), not all p16-positive cells are senescent and not all senescent cells express p16. Further studies are needed to better define heterogeneity involving other hallmarks of aging and to also explore associations between heterogeneity involving these biological measures with clinical manifestations or outcomes.