Epigenetic studies of the ageing process

Abstract

The ageing organism goes through radical changes. Studies on the experimental populations show that there might be epigenetic mechanisms switching off homozygote loci and switching on heterozygote loci during the ageing process. This is assumed to be because of the higher metabolic demands from homozygote loci. A corollary to this hypothesis is that the loci with the largest effect on longevity must have a lower degree of homozygosity. We tested this hypothesis in an international dairy cattle population consisting of 7038 bulls genotyped with more than 50,000 SNPS. The results supported our hypotheses, however, only for loci whose effects were smaller than 4.0 standard deviations larger than the average.