In a paper published online in advance in PNAS this week, an international team led by investigators at the Centro Nacional de BiotecnologÃa in Madrid presents a single-nucleotide resolution level DNA methylation analysis of newborn and centenarian genomes using whole-genome bisulfite sequencing. Overall, the team reports having found that "the centenarian DNA had a lower DNA methylation content and a reduced correlation in the methylation status of neighboring cytosine-phosphate-guanine throughout the genome in comparison with the more homogeneously methylated newborn DNA."
Elsewhere, Northwestern University's Christopher Kuzawa and his colleagues show that the association of paternal age with offspring telomere length "is cumulative across multiple generations." In the sample they studied, Kuzawa et al., found that "grandchildren of older paternal grandfathers at the birth of fathers have longer telomeres, independent of, and additive to, the association of their father's age at birth with TL [telomere length]," they report.
And researchers at Japan's University of Tsukuba show in PNAS this week that G13997A mtDNA regulates diabetes development, lymphoma formation, and metastasis in a transmitochondrial mouse model.