{
  "abstract": "Aging reshapes the human body at the cellular level, yet how cell identity, morphology, and spatial organization remodel across organs and the adult lifespan remains poorly mapped, at a scale and lifespan coverage that molecular spatial assays cannot yet reach. Treating the GTEx histopathology archive as a population-scale, lifespan-resolved resource for spatial biology, we detected over 3.5 billion single cells across 16 human organs from nearly one thousand individuals. Cell density declined pervasively but organ-specifically, and vision-language phenotyping resolved epithelial cells into nine subtypes with divergent aging trajectories, including loss of ovarian granulosa cells at ~45% per decade. Community detection on spatial cell graphs identified functional tissue units, over a quarter of which remodeled with age along a shared trajectory from dense, specialized units toward sparser, stromal- and immune-enriched structures. Critically, this architectural remodeling was largely decoupled from cell composition (R2=0.07), showing that human tissues age along two partly independent axes, a pervasive loss of cells and a distinct remodeling of the architecture they form, with structural decline exceeding what cellular composition alone predicts.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences"
  ],
  "article_type": "New results",
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 4,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "E. Abila"
    },
    {
      "name": "Y. Zheng"
    },
    {
      "name": "Z. Bago-Horvath"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "A. F. Rendeiro"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/b8bxv68dzmhd4.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.64898/2026.09.06.749715",
  "fulltext_url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.06.749715v1.full",
  "id": "b8bxv68dzmhd4",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.06.749715v1",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-NC",
  "licence_label": "CC BY-NC",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "biorxiv",
      "systems biology"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "1312|Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7212443844",
  "pdf_url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.06.749715v1.full.pdf",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-09-06",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/b8bxv68dzmhd4.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:21:51Z",
      "native_id": "10.64898/2026.09.06.749715",
      "source": "biorxiv",
      "url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.06.749715v1"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "biology",
      "origin": "biorxiv:systems biology",
      "subfield": "systems-synthetic"
    }
  ],
  "title": "A single-cell view of human tissue aging reveals architectural decline beyond cellular composition",
  "title_text": "A single-cell view of human tissue aging reveals architectural decline beyond cellular composition",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:21:51Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/b8bxv68dzmhd4",
  "venue": "bioRxiv",
  "versions": []
}