Loan to Nguyen from The University of Queensland, Australia presented at the Nanopore Community Meeting 2021 on “An epigenetic aging clock for cattle using portable sequencing technology.” They spoke about the need learn birth date of cattle for breed registrations and genomic selection. However, there is no gene clock for cattle. Thus, they took sixty six animals from five days to seventeen years, all female, for a study. They collected and prepared DNA using a QIAGEN kit and sequenced on a MinION after using the Ligation Sequencing Kit. The sequences were then used for methylation calling (5c) and sites were filtered. The team compared sites called in at least 80% of animals. Shared genes between cattle and human/dog studies that were associated with age were further studied. The prediction accuracy of predicted age and actual age was about 0.71 for all sites. To improve their clock, they aim to continue their work for 900 samples using the PromethION! They want to apply the filtering program Prowler and maybe use Adaptive/Cas9 enrichment sequencing for 43 genes. Their future studies are ambitious and would help refine the system… and development of new approaches. I want to learn more about Prowler.
