ACM International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics · Jun 30, 2026
How Old Are You Really? A Hands-on Computational Tutorial on Epigenetic Clocks as Biomarkers of Biological Aging Across Diverse Populations
By Konwar C, Zhuang BC
DNA methylation (DNAm)-based epigenetic clocks are machine-learning (ML)-trained predictors of biological age that have emerged as widely adopted biomarkers in aging research, population health, and clinical epidemiology. Despite their increased application, the analytical workflows and computational foundations underlying them remain largely inaccessible and inconsistently applied across the broader bioinformatics and computational biology community. This half-day, hands-on tutorial addresses that gap, providing researchers at any career stage with an integrated framework for epigenetic clock investigations, from biological foundations through clock computation, health outcome association analyses, and population-level application across ancestrally diverse cohorts. All hands-on exercises use open-source R/Bioconductor tools and require no prior epigenetics expertise. By the end, participants will be equipped to incorporate DNAm-derived biological aging metrics into their research pipelines, with analytical skills broadly transferable across omics disciplines.