Epigenetic aging in cows is accelerated by milk production

ABSTRACT

DNA methylation has proven to be the most promising age-predictive biomarker in mammals resulting in the emergence of ‘epigenetic clocks’ that describe the relationship between methylation levels and age. Using Targeted bisulfite Sequencing, we evaluated blood DNA-methylation data from 96 domesticated cows (Bos Taurus) of which 88 were adults and 8 were calves. This allowed us to measure DNA methylation across three thousand regions in the genome that were conserved across mammals. The significant association of age with the changes in DNA methylation enabled us to construct an epigenetic clock that predicts the age of cows to within nine months. We also investigated whether factors exist that moderate the association between epigenetic age and actual age and found that milk production levels significantly increase the rate of epigenetic ageing, suggesting that the stress of excessive milk production might be accelerating epigenetic ageing in cows.

KEYWORDS:

• Epigenetic clock
• epigenetic pacemaker
• cows
• bovine
• DNA methylation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and its supplementary materials https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1HHmLP6ElTVcbjZw9bbdEQcP2ak2Fa3-x?usp=sharing.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15592294.2023.2240188

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.