The Duke Senescent Cell Evaluations in Normal Tissues (SCENT) Mapping Center

ABSTRACT –SCENT– Overall Cellular senescence is a stress-response, as well as a critical component of cell fate during development, repair, resilience and normal aging. Deepening and broadening our investigations into cellular senescence in normal condition will advance our knowledge of healthy aging as well as age-related disabilities, thereby leading to integrated and inclusive approaches to Gero-Protection and Gero-Therapeutics. A comprehensive, high- resolution, Atlas of cellular senescence in various human tissues based on multimodal and multidimensional analyses is required to address this need. The Duke Senescent Cell Evaluations in Normal Tissues (SCENT) U54 Tissue Mapping Center (TMC) will leverage the broad and world-leading expertise of Duke University School of Medicine faculty to contribute to the overall goal of mapping senescent cells at single cell resolution in normal human tissues of across age-span and demographics. We will take advantage of Duke's broad expertise in many areas, including pulmonary critical care, lung and heart transplant surgery, translational research, and bioinformatics, to collect high-quality normal tissue specimens for biobanking, multimodal, high-resolution analysis, and data integration to fully characterize cellular senescence in human organs and tissues. The Duke SCENT TMC will be organized around 4 Cores as required by SenNet: The Administrative Core (AC) of this TCM will provide guidance and leadership to the other cores and communicate with NIH Staff and the SenNet Consortium during the set-up phase to agree on common protocols. The Biospecimen Core will establish best practices for prospective acquisition, preservation and processing of diverse, high-quality normal healthy human tissues and associated biofluids. The Biological Analysis Core will deliver state-of-the-art profiling, led by a team of highly accomplished research scientists who have successfully utilized these specific platforms in conjunction with previous and/or current senescent analyses. The Data Analysis Core (DAC) will manage, process and analyze the data generated to profile senescent cell signatures and construct senescent cell tissue maps, as well as collaborate with the Administrative Core to coordinate sharing of data, methods and pipelines with other SenNet institutions.