Although long life tends to run in families, genetics has far less influence on life span than previously estimated, according to a new analysis published in GENETICS. Ruby et al. used a data set of over 400 million historical persons obtained from public pedigrees on Ancestry.com to estimate the heritability of life span, finding it to be well below 10%.
“We can potentially learn many things about the biology of aging from human genetics, but if the heritability of life span is low it tempers our expectations about what types of things we can learn and how easy it will be,” says lead author Graham Ruby (Calico Life Sciences). “It helps contextualize the questions that scientists studying aging can effectively ask.”
Calico Life Sciences is a research and development company whose mission is to understand the fundamental science of aging. So how did Calico get involved with Ancestry, the online genealogy resource?
“We wanted to get a sense for the contribution of genetics to life span, and that’s something you can study using pedigrees,” says Ruby. With millions of members, Ancestry has no shortage of pedigrees.
Read more at Genetics Society of America
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