Profiling the transcriptomic age of single-cells in humans

Although aging clocks predicting the age of individual organisms have been extensively studied, the age of individual cells remained largely unexplored. Most recently single-cell omics clocks were developed for the mouse, however, extensive profiling the age of human cells is still lacking. To fill this gap, here we use available scRNA-seq data of 1,058,909 blood cells of 508 healthy, human donors (between 19 and 75 years), for developing single-cell transcriptomic clocks and predicting the age of human blood cells. By the application of the proposed cell-type-specific single-cell clocks, our main observations are that (i) transcriptomic age is associated with cellular senescence; (ii) the transcriptomic age of classical monocytes as well as naive B and T cells is decreased in moderate COVID-19 followed by an increase for some cell types in severe COVID-19; and (iii) the human embryo cells transcriptomically rejuvenated at the morulae and blastocyst stages. In summary, here we demonstrate that single-cell transcriptomic clocks are useful tools to investigate aging and rejuvenation at the single-cell level.