An interferon gamma response signature links myocardial aging and immunosenescence

Aims Aging entails profound immunological transformations that can impact myocardial homeostasis and predispose to heart failure. However, preclinical research in the immune-cardiology field is mostly conducted in young healthy animals, which potentially weakens its translational relevance. Herein, we sought to investigate how the aging T-cell compartment associates with changes in myocardial cell biology in aged mice. Methods and results We phenotyped the antigen-experienced effector/memory T cells purified from heart-draining lymph nodes of 2-, 6-, 12-, and 18-month-old C57BL/6J mice using single-cell RNA/T cell receptor sequencing. Simultaneously, we profiled all non-cardiomyocyte cell subsets purified from 2- to 18-month-old hearts and integrated our data with publicly available cardiomyocyte single-cell sequencing datasets. Some of these findings were confirmed at the protein level by flow cytometry. With aging, the heart-draining lymph node and myocardial T cells underwent clonal expansion and exhibited an up-regulated pro-inflammatory transcription signature, marked by an increased interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma) production. In parallel, all major myocardial cell populations showed increased IFN-gamma responsive signature with aging. In the aged cardiomyocytes, a stronger IFN-gamma response signature was paralleled by the dampening of expression levels of transcripts related to most metabolic pathways, especially oxidative phosphorylation. Likewise, induced pluripotent stem cells-derived cardiomyocytes exposed to chronic, low grade IFN-gamma treatment showed a similar inhibition of metabolic activity. Conclusions By investigating the paired age-related alterations in the T cells found in the heart and its draining lymph nodes, we provide evidence for increased myocardial IFN-gamma signaling with age, which is associated with inflammatory and metabolic shifts typically seen in heart failure.