Human skeletal muscle aging atlas

Skeletal muscle aging is a key contributor to age-related frailty and sarcopenia with substantial implications for global health. Here we profiled 90,902 single cells and 92,259 single nuclei from 17 donors to map the aging process in the adult human intercostal muscle, identifying cellular changes in each muscle compartment. We found that distinct subsets of muscle stem cells exhibit decreased ribosome biogenesis genes and increased CCL2 expression, causing different aging phenotypes. Our atlas also highlights an expansion of nuclei associated with the neuromuscular junction, which may reflect re-innervation, and outlines how the loss of fast-twitch myofibers is mitigated through regeneration and upregulation of fast-type markers in slow-twitch myofibers with age. Furthermore, we document the function of aging muscle microenvironment in immune cell attraction. Overall, we present a comprehensive human skeletal muscle aging resource (https://www.muscleageingcellatlas.org/) together with an in-house mouse muscle atlas to study common features of muscle aging across species. The Muscle Aging Cell Atlas presents approximately 200,000 single-cell and single-nuclei transcriptomes from 17 human donors across different ages, uncovering mechanisms of aging in muscle stem cells, myofibers and microenvironment cells, and demonstrates parallels in mouse muscle aging.