Author Identifier (ORCID)
Yao Xia: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0076-3660
Syed Mohammed Shamsul Islam: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3200-2903
Xingang Li: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0252-154X
Wei Wang: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1430-1360
Abstract
Previous studies have demonstrated that the immunoglobulin G (IgG) N-glycome and transcriptome are potential biochemical signatures of chronological and biological ages, and several aging clocks have been developed. By integrating the IgG N-glycome and transcriptome, we propose a novel aging clock, gtAge. We developed a deep reinforcement learning-based multiomics integration method called AlphaSnake. The results showed that AlphaSnake achieved a predicted coefficient of determination (R2) value of 0.853, outperforming the concatenation-based integration method (R2 = 0.820). The gtAge estimated by AlphaSnake explained up to 85.3% of the variance in chronological age, which was higher than that in age predicted from IgG N-glycome solely (gAge; R2 = 0.290) and age predicted from transcriptome solely (tAge; R2 = 0.812). We also found that the delta age—the difference between the predicted age and chronological age—was associated with several age-related phenotypes. Both delta gtAge and tAge were negatively associated with high-density lipoprotein (p = 0.02 and p = 0.022, respectively), whereas delta gAge was positively correlated with cholesterol (p = 0.006), triglyceride (p = 0.002), fasting plasma glucose (p = 0.014), low-density lipoprotein (p = 0.006), and glycated hemoglobin (p = 0.039). These findings suggest that gtAge, tAge, and gAge are potential biomarkers for biological age.
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
1-1-2025
Publication Title
Engineering
Publisher
Elsevier
School
School of Science / Nutrition and Health Innovation Research Institute / School of Medical and Health Sciences
RAS ID
82324
Funders
Australia–China International Collaborative Grant (NHMRC APP1112767-NSFC 81561128020) / European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program (779238) / Edith Cowan University (ECU-HDR 10492768, G1006465) / Western Australian Future Health Research and Innovation Funds (WANMA/EL2023-24/2, WANMA/Ideas2024-25/5)
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
 
				 
					
Comments
Xia, Y., Islam, S. M. S., Li, X., Baten, A., Tan, X., & Wang, W. (2025). Deep reinforcement learning–driven multi-omics integration for constructing gtAge: A novel aging clock from IgG N-glycome and blood transcriptome. Engineering. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2025.08.016