It all started with a string of people telling me how I looked younger than my age. Shaving my beard didn’t help either.

Then a friend was mocking me on how childish I appears on some of my last photos. And was jocking I might be affected by a mutation on Klotho-related genes.

What the fuck is that? Turns out it really exist, and there’s a SNP tied to that hormone and called rs9536314 .

Luckily, it is a SNP covered by the first generation of 23andMe chips. Having downloaded the raw data a while back, it is a matter of installing the Python arv package:

 1 $ pip install arv
 2 Collecting arv
 3   Downloading arv-0.9.2-cp27-none-macosx_10_12_intel.whl (92kB)
 4     100% |████████████████████████████████| 102kB 10kB/s
 5 Collecting cython>=0.25 (from arv)
 6   Downloading Cython-0.25.2-cp27-cp27m-macosx_10_6_intel.macosx_10_9_intel.macosx_10_9_x86_64.macosx_10_10_intel.macosx_10_10_x86_64.whl (4.1MB)
 7     100% |████████████████████████████████| 4.1MB 201kB/s
 8 Installing collected packages: cython, arv
 9 Successfully installed arv-0.9.2 cython-0.25.2

Let’s now find out about that SNP:

>>> from arv import load
>>> genome = load("kev_full_genome.txt")
>>> genome["rs9536314"]
<SNP: chromosome=13 position=33628138 genotype=<Genotype 'GT'>>
>>>

Bingo! With the GT variant, I’m supposed to have higher plasma klotho concentration. Which is, according to some studies , reported to:

  • affect longevity in mice,

  • associated with greater brain cortical volume,

  • show lower less decline with age on standardized cognitive tests,

  • score better on some Alzheimer’s disease tests.

As usual all these studies are preliminary and should be taken with a huge grain of salt.

But my friend’s diagnostic was right. My dear friend, you made my day and I owe you a mojito! ;)

And thanks Mom and Dad for your DNA! :)