A New Way to Detect Aging

Scientists may have found a new way to estimate how fast different parts of a person’s body are aging. The technique involves tallying small chemical tags, called methyl groups, attached to DNA. These methyl groups start out in specific, predictable places throughout our genomes. As we age, they are added and removed. By analyzing changes in the number and location of methyl groups, the scientists estimated the chronological age of hundreds of people with surprising accuracy. The work has a wide range of possible applications, including helping predict whether a person is at risk for certain diseases and enabling forensic scientists to determine a person’s age from a blood or tissue sample.
Source: NIGMS Biomedical Beat - Category: Research Source Type: news