SUMMARY Aging has been associated with a progressive decline of proteostasis, but how this process manifests itself at the level of proteome composition remains largely unexplored. Here we profiled more than 5,000 proteins along the lifespan of the nematode C. elegans. We find that one third of proteins change in abundance at least 2-fold during aging, resulting in a severe proteome imbalance. These changes are reduced in the long-lived daf-2 mutant, but enhanced in the short-lived daf-16 mutant. While ribosomal proteins decline and lose normal stoichiometry, proteasome complexes increase. Proteome imbalance is accompanied by widespread protein aggregation, with abundant proteins that exceed solubility contributing most to aggregate load. Notably, the properties by which proteins are selected for aggregation differ in the daf-2 mutant, and an increased formation of aggregates associated with small heat shock proteins is observed. We suggest that sequestering proteins into chaperone-enriched aggregates is a protective strategy to slow proteostasis decline during nematode aging.

Summary The maintenance of protein solubility is a fundamental aspect of protein homeostasis, as aggregation is associated with cytotoxicity and a variety of human diseases. Numerous proteins unrelated in sequence and structure, however, can misfold and aggregate, and widespread aggregation can occur in living systems under stress or ageing. A crucial question in this context is why only certain proteins aggregate in vivo while others do not. We identify here the proteins most vulnerable to aggregation as those whose cellular concentrations are high relative to their solubilities. These supersaturated proteins represent a metastable sub-proteome involved in pathological aggregation during stress and ageing, and are overrepresented in biochemical processes associated with neurodegenerative disorders. Consequently, such cellular processes become dysfunctional when the ability to keep intrinsically supersaturated proteins soluble is compromised. Thus, the simultaneous analysis of abundance and solubility can rationalize the diverse cellular pathologies linked to neurodegenerative diseases and aging.

In Table S3B of the above article, protein identifiers were inadvertently matched with the wrong values. Table S3B reports a subset of data from Table S1, calculated as protein abundance values relative to day 1 of worm age. Note that, in Table S1, the values are displayed correctly. A corrected version of the Table S3B is available with this Correction online. The error does not affect the conclusions in the study, and we apologize for any inconvenience that it may have caused.