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@alicefrolov.bsky.social Sep 6, 2026, 5:10 PM

Sharing a heatmap from an ongoing methodological exercise: "Age-associated erosion of DNA repair pathway capacity across human tissues"

#DNArepair #DNAdamageResponse #GenomeInstability #BasexcisionRepair #HomologousRecombination #GenomeMaintenance #Mutagenesis

Sharing a heatmap from an ongoing methodological exercise: "Age-associated erosion of DNA repair pathway capacity across human tissues," with the subtitle "Simulated relative repair activity for six core DNA damage response pathways (young vs aged donors)."

The visualization arranges six canonical DNA damage response (DDR) pathways along the vertical axis: base excision repair (BER), nucleotide excision repair (NER), mismatch repair (MMR), homologous recombination (HR), non-homologous end joining (NHEJ), and interstrand crosslink repair (the Fanconi anemia pathway). The horizontal axis stratifies representative tissue compartments (hematopoietic, hepatic, dermal, skeletal muscle, cortical neuronal, and intestinal epithelium) in paired young and aged donor columns. Cell values encode relative repair activity normalized within pathway, with the color gradient scaled from low (attenuated capacity) to high (preserved capacity).

I want to emphasize that the matrix is simulated. Values were parameterized to reproduce directional trends reported in the literature rather than to represent empirical measurements. The intent is to provide a compact scaffold for discussing pathway and tissue-specific vulnerability, not to assert quantitative effect sizes.

The simulated pattern reflects several recurring observations: pronounced decline in double-strand break repair fidelity, particularly HR relative to the more error-prone NHEJ, alongside diminished BER throughput in post-mitotic compartments where oxidative lesion burden accumulates. Neuronal and hematopoietic columns display the steepest attenuation, consistent with reported associations between DDR insufficiency, mutational accumulation, and clonal dynamics.

I would welcome critique on the parameterization strategy, particularly the choice to normalize within pathway rather than across tissues, which necessarily obscures absolute cross-pathway baseline differences.

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