The Scientist, July 13, 2010.
At the heart of a feverish debate over the validity of a recent genome-wide association study (GWAS) of centenarians is the authors’ possible misuse of gene chips in different testing groups, part of an ongoing issue affecting other GWAS research. How this variation might impact the validity of the longevity findings, however, including the 150 SNPs associated with extreme longevity, is unclear.
The initially heralded study, published in Science Express July 2, examined the genomes of about 1,000 centenarians, those rare humans that have reached the age of 100, and compared them to those of controls. However, the authors used two different gene chips to analyze their centenarian population, with one gathering about 10 percent of the data. Read More >