title: Genomics of ageing in twins.
abstract: Ageing is a complex multifactorial process, reflecting the progression of all degenerative pathways within an organism. Due to the increase of life expectancy, in recent years, there is a pressing need to identify early-life events and risk factors that determine health outcomes in later life. So far, genetic variation only explains ~20-25 % of the variability of human survival to age 80+. This clearly implies that other factors (environmental, epigenetic and lifestyle) contribute to lifespan and the rate of healthy ageing within an individual. Twin studies in the past two decades proved to be a very powerful tool to discriminate the genetic from the environmental component. The aim of this review is to describe the basic concepts of the twin study design and to report some of the latest studies in which high-throughput technologies (e.g. genome/epigenome-wide assay, next generation sequencing, MS metabolic profiling) combined with the classical twin design have been applied to the analysis of novel 'omics' to further understand the molecular mechanisms of human ageing.
authors.affiliation: Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology,King's College London,St Thomas' Hospital Campus, Lambeth Palace Rd, London SE1 7EH,UK.
authors.forename: Massimo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mangino
mesh_terms: D000375:Aging / Q000235:genetics*; D044127:Epigenesis, Genetic; D059647:Gene-Environment Interaction; D014644:Genetic Variation; D023281:Genomics; D059014:High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing; D006801:Humans; D055432:Metabolomics; D012307:Risk Factors; D018433:Twin Studies as Topic; D014427:Twins / Q000235:genetics*