Ok, ELI5 anyone? I have a homozygous MTHFR 677 C>T mutation, e.g. my body methylates at like 20-30% efficiency unless I supplement with methylated B-12, e.g. methylcobalamin. Is this study good news for me or bad news for me?
- DNA Methylation - DNA Acetylation
Methylation downregulates a gene's expression. Acetylation upregulates a gene's expression. In any case, over your lifetime methylation profiles of your genetics can vary, generally increasing.
Methylation of your cells isn't something that happens in every tissue at the same rate. So you actually need to define a biological clock based on methylation over time for all the different tissues. Then you can also build clocks for 2 or more tissues, or the whole organism... maybe
These clocks are mainly being used for research, but one real-world application they are being used for is life insurance companies. If you are 60, but your methylome makes you appear 50, then you'll get a discount, as it is assumed that your health state will be closer to that of a 50-year-old.
So if you have a systematically distorted methylome, and you want to buy life insurance, the clock could be good news or bad news for you, depending on how your mutation affects the clock readout.
It used to be dogma that genomic hypomethylation occurs with age, or in other words, that methylation decreases as you age. It is now thought to be more complicated than that, but...if it is even partially true, that would imply that lower methylation levels would be associated with a higher age on the clock.
So probably you would not get a discount, sadly.