Imagine a clinical study of longevity using 120 clones of you or me. Taurine may be effective at extending lifespan and healthspan of C57BL/6J mice but will it work as well using genetically diverse mice such as the UM-HET3 mice?
Like humans, the UM-HET3 mice are genetically diverse (they segregate for about 11.5 million sequence variants). My hope is that taurine supplementation would work just as well using 120 UM-HET3 mice. A robust finding like that would impress me so much more.
I wish high profile journals—Science and Nature and Cell—would demand that submissions include at least several genotypes of mice. N = 1 studies are just barely worth discussing in HN with respect to humans.
In this case the authors did extend to other models to support their claims but these supplementary components do not test longevity directly.
Having pointed out the downside of this work, I am glad to see this study and will treat it as a promising pilot. Given much previous work my guess, and tacitly, those of the authors, is that taurine supplementation will be beneficial for many genotypes of mice and even humans.
However, there will not be one optimal treatment regimen for all mice or for all humans.
By the way: A 16 oz can of Monster contains 2 grams of taurine.