Breaking news! It’s official and it’s scientifically buttressed in the “Aging” journal. Lean design is what makes epiAge so robust, reliable and replicable. The amazing results, which we witness day in day out with our proprietary biological age test based on 13 CpGs, are now being showcased by an “ultra-bare bones” clock from the house of epiAge.
You know it from the world of spices: when your senses are assaulted by a cacophony of aromas, it’s hard to discern the tenor of the sauce. So, less is often more.
When it comes to epigenetic clocks, however, this creed has enjoyed limited acceptance. Based on Steve Horvaths original biological clock, which enlisted 353 CpGs, most biological clocks still bet on the analysis of hundreds or even thousands of CpGs as well as the bead-chip array methodology.
Unfortunately, these choices entail many subsequent readjustments due to serious issues. Indeed, selecting a vast number of CpGs that correlate with ageing tends to muddy the waters when it comes to a precise estimate of individual biological ageing. And bead-chip arrays are infamous for e.g., probe variability and hybridisation inefficiencies, which compromise the reliability of data and hamper replication.
So, the challenge set with EpiAgePublic was twofold.
Researchers first sought to drastically reduce the number of CpGs to 3, all of them located along the ELOVL2 gene – a gene that robustly correlates with biological ageing. The second challenge was to prove that Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), thanks to e.g., base-resolution accuracy, and broader genomic coverage, addresses the limitations of bead-chip arrays, which make for technical noise and many other problems.
Relying on a large and varied dataset of 4600 individuals, EpiAgePublic, was able to impressively compete with Horvath’s DNAmAge, Hannum’s DNAmAgeHannum, DNAmPhenoAge, DNAmAgeSkinBloodClock, and DNA GrimAge (versions 1 and 2). Not only did EpiAgePublic achieve comparable predictive accuracy with just three CpGs, it also occasionally outperformed some of these clocks in its sensitivity to variations of epigenetic age acceleration. It thus proved how biological age determination can be streamlined – without sacrificing responsiveness.
And that is the premise of our epiAge test. With just 13 CpGs, it offers you both lean design for solidly replicable results and a more comprehensive epigenetic signature of ageing. All this for an unbeatable price!
Curious about the revolutionary findings and the exciting technical details?
Plunge in right here:
David Cheishvili, Sonia Do Carmo, Filippo Caraci, Margherita Grasso, Claudio Cuello, Moshe Szyf, “EpiAge: A next-generation sequencing-based ELOVL2 epigenetic clock for biological age assessment in saliva and blood across health and disease”. Aging (Albany NY), forthcoming. doi: 10.18632/aging.206188. Available online: https://www.aging-us.com/article/206188/text
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