Age-related changes in genomic stability of horses

Recently, the old horse has been proposed as a model to study telomere-dependent senescence, immunosenescence and inflamm-aging. In the present paper, we used 80 Hucul and Anglo-Arabian horses divided into 3 age groups (juvenile, adult, old) to evaluate age-dependent changes at the genomic and DNA level and in cell proliferative potential. The level of positive TUNEL cells (both apoptotic and with DNA fragmentation), oxidative DNA damage (8-oxoG immunostaining), sister chromatid exchange and bleomycin-induced chromatid breaks were significantly increased in the combined old group compared to the combined adult group. We observed a negative correlation between micronuclei formation and age, which may be associated with damaged cells undergoing apoptosis, rather than expressing micronuclei. We were unable to show any significant changes in the nuclear division index value, which reflects the proliferative status of the viable cell fraction during aging. Here, we show that breed-independent and age-associated changes in genomic stability may contribute, at least in part, to the aging process in the horse.