Research Paper|Volume 9, Issue 3|pp 1055—1068

An epigenetic aging clock for dogs and wolves

Michael J. Thompson¹, Bridgett vonHoldt², Steve Horvath³, Matteo Pellegrini¹

¹Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
²Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
³Department of Human Genetics and Biomathematics, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA

* Joint first or last authors

Received: February 6, 2016Accepted: March 18, 2017Published: March 28, 2017

Copyright: © 2017 Thompson et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Several articles describe highly accurate age estimation methods based on human DNA-methylation data. It is not yet known whether similar epigenetic aging clocks can be developed based on blood methylation data from canids. Using Reduced Representation Bisulfite Sequencing, we assessed blood DNA-methylation data from 46 domesticated dogs (Canis familiaris) and 62 wild gray wolves (C. lupus). By regressing chronological dog age on the resulting CpGs, we defined highly accurate multivariate age estimators for dogs (based on 41 CpGs), wolves (67 CpGs), and both combined (115 CpGs). Age related DNA methylation changes in canids implicate similar gene ontology categories as those observed in humans suggesting an evolutionarily conserved mechanism underlying age-related DNA methylation in mammals.