Many chronological aging clocks can be found throughout the epigenome: Implications for quantifying biological aging.

ABSTRACT: Epigenetic alterations are a hallmark of aging and age-related diseases. Computational models using DNA methylation data can create "epigenetic clocks" which are proposed to reflect "biological" aging. Thus, it is important to understand the relationship between predictive clock sites and aging biology. To do this, we examined over 450,000 methylation sites from 9,699 samples. We found ~20% of the measured genomic cytosines can be used to make many different epigenetic clocks whose age prediction performance surpasses that of telomere length. Of these predictive sites, the average methylation change over a lifetime was small (~1.5%) and these sites were under-represented in canonical regions of epigenetic regulation. There was only a weak association between "accelerated" epigenetic aging

SUBMITTER: Porter HL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8590098 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature