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The indexed individual, from now on termed M116, w The indexed individual, from now on termed M116, was the world's oldest verified living person from January 17th 2023 until her passing on August 19th 2024, reaching the age of 117 years and 168 days (https://www.supercentenarian.com/records.html). She was a Caucasian woman born on March 4th 1907 in San Francisco, USA, from Spanish parents and settled in Spain since she was 8. A timeline of her life events and her genealogical tree are shown in Supplementary Fig. 1a-b. Although centenarians are becoming more common in the demographics of human populations, the so-called supercentenarians (over 110 years old) are still a rarity. In Catalonia, the historic nation where M116 lived, the lifeexpectancy for women is 86 years, so she exceeded the average by more than 30 years (https://www.idescat.cat). In a similar manner to premature aging syndromes, such as Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria and Werner syndrome, which can provide relevant clues about the mechanisms of aging, the study of supercentenarians might also shed light on the pathways involved in lifespan. To unfold the biological properties exhibited by such a remarkable human being, we developed a comprehensive multiomics analysis of her genomic, transcriptomic, metabolomic, proteomic, microbiomic and epigenomic landscapes in different tissues, as depicted in Fig. 1a, comparing the results with those observed in non-supercentenarian populations. The picture that emerges from our study shows that extremely advanced age and poor health are not intrinsically linked and that both processes can be distinguished and dissected at the molecular level.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Samples from the subject were obtained from four different sources: total peripheral blood, saliva, urine and stool at different times. Most of the analyses were performed in the blood material at the time point of 116 years and 74 days, unless otherwise specifically indicated (Data set 1). The simple karyotype of the supercentenarian did not show any gross chromosomal alteration (Supplementary Fig. 1c). Since many reports indicate the involvement of telomeres in aging and lifespan1, we interrogated the telomere length of the M116 individual using High-Throughput Quantitative Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization (HT-Q-FISH) analysis2. Illustrative confocal images with DAPI staining and the telomeric probe (TTAGGG) for M116 and two control samples are shown in Fig. 1b. Strikingly, we observed that the supercentenarian exhibited the shortest mean telomere length among all healthy volunteers3 with a value of barely 8 kb (Fig. 1c). Even more noticeably, the M116 individual displayed a 40% of short telomeres below the 20th percentile of all the studied samples (Fig. 1c). Thus, the observed far reach longevity of our case occurred in the chromosomal context of extremely short telomeres. Interestingly, because the M116 individual presented an overall good health status, it is tempting to speculate that, in this ... |