Standardization to a Single Epigenetic Clock is Much Overdue

In the past year or two, a great deal of effort on the part of leading researchers has gone into trying to standardize the use of a single epigenetic clock based on DNA methylation status of CpG sites on the genome. Suitable candidate universal mammalian clocks now exist. There are good reasons for standardization. Given that any large amount of omics data can be used to produce aging clocks, where "clock" in this context means a weighted combination of measured values that correlates well with chronological age or biological age, there is an essentially infinite number of potential clocks. People can build or cherry pick clocks that are optimized to produce large numbers for their specific therapeutic approach to age-slowing or age-reversing intervention. Further, comparing results obtained with different clocks is essentially impossible. This leads to wasted effort. As an example of why standardization is important, we might look at today's open access paper, in which researchers pick a clock that isn't one of the proposed standards, uses only four CpG sites (a tiny number!) and show large differences between study groups. One wonders if they picked the clock because the numbers are large. One can't really do anything to compare this data with data obtained from different clocks: this paper is thus unlikely to contribute meaningfully to the advance of knowledge. Further, we should probably assume that any epigenetic clock built using such a small number of CpG sites ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs