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In honor of #BlackInGeneticsWeek I’m gonna see if I can make my research fit into a few tweets! 
I was drawn to epigenetics because I found the concepts of personalized medicine and intergenerational inheritance fascinating! I wanted to know more (1/?)
I was drawn to epigenetics because I found the concepts of personalized medicine and intergenerational inheritance fascinating! I wanted to know more (1/?)
I started grad school and joined a lab that focused on epigenetic changes with age. My PI had been involved in research a couple years before I started that found your age has a HUGE effect on your DNA 
methylation patterns (2/?) https://doi.org/10.1101/gr.125187.111
methylation patterns (2/?) https://doi.org/10.1101/gr.125187.111
The following year, it was found that you could pretty accurately predict someone’s age based on a few hundred sites around the genome across several different tissue types, exciting stuff (3/?) https://doi.org/10.1186/gb-2013-14-10-r115
Now the scary part, researchers found that there could be discrepancies between your predicted age and your actual age. And when this happened in the direction where your DNA looks “older” than it is, you’ll actually age at the rate you body thinks it is, not it’s real age (4)
This translates to people who’s bodies think they’re older than they actually are actually having higher rates of mortality (5/?) https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-015-0584-6
(5/?) https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-015-0584-6
So if we see this link to mortality, you’d also think there must be a link to disease risk? Well the research on that was less clear. But there was reason to believe this was bc ppl used cross sectional samples (not the best for aging studies) (6/?) https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-016-1030-0
*enter my paper*
By taking advantage of a longitudinal cohort, we were able to observe a relationship between this ‘accelerated age’ measurement and risk factors for age related disease 
(7/?) https://doi.org/10.1007/s11357-017-0001-z
(7/?) https://doi.org/10.1007/s11357-017-0001-z
I learned a ton of new techniques in bioinformatics & statistics in the process and pick up a love of coding. I'm also proud we used a cohort with some racial/ethnic diversity. Not something many other genetics studies can say, but that's a convo for another day 
(8/8)
(8/8)
