TwinsUK

TwinsUK is a national cohort study examining the impact of environment and genomics on health across the adult life course, with particular strengths in healthy ageing and age-related disease.

TwinsUK was founded in 1992 and the cohort comprises 15,700 volunteer twins aged 18-104 (mean age 59), with an equal number of mono-zygotic (identical) and di-zygotic twin pairs.

UKHSA holds a range of PBLs and lymphoblastoid cell lines generated from TwinsUK participants that can be accessed by scientific researchers. These samples can be linked with the vast array of data collected on the cohort, including 10,000+ longitudinal phenotypes and deep ‘omics data, including transcriptomics, epigenetics metabolomics, and microbiome. A full description of available phenotypes is listed on the TwinsUK website (https://twinsuk.ac.uk/resources-for-researchers/our-data/).

Written by Debbie Blick