I was also very impressive by the progress over the last year. GA4GH is really moving into the Age of Implementation!

We did our best to match the age of the parents at conception and this is only measuring lengths in the child. Moreover, given that the dads are older than mom, if anything we are under-estimating the difference (since older should mean shorter).

This suggest that telomere maintenance in sperm is more robust than in oocytes and impacts the inherited telomeres. Full paper is below. Curious to know what you think as this is a new area for us!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The most interesting finding was that in the child, paternally transmitted alleles were significantly longer than age-matched maternal ones (Δmean = 409 bp), particularly when from older parents (Δmean = 698 bp, p = 8.9e-05).

It got really interesting when we started to do allelic tracing since we had trio data. Amazing to be able to do it by eye in some cases and then @davidlougheed.bsky.social helped us build a tool called TeloScore to apply it to all the families we had.

We were able to confirm that different chromosome arms have different length distribution, consistent with what was reported in Karimian et al 2024. We also observed the expected age-related length decrease.

Dear @moriartylab.bsky.social, thanks for sharing your story! It was great to work with you at the beginning of the pandemic. I’m so impressed by how much you were able to do since then! You have always been truly committed to the cause. Please take care of yourself, it all starts with that!

We don’t claim to do it perfectly either… Just think it’s important to highlight the annotation problem and show that we have new tools (eg MPRA) to improve things.