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. 2023 Mar 28;24:51. doi: 10.1186/s13059-023-02888-y

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© The Author(s) 2023

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

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Fig. 2 — Ageing as the result of software design flaws. The developmental software program is a set of instructions or interconnected subroutines with numerous inputs and outputs that trigger a complicated cascade of events that drive growth and development. Because this software program is optimized for reproduction, however, it fails to deactivate a subset of its subroutines which are beneficial during development (blue shading) but then become detrimental later in life (red shading). With age, such subroutines could gradually lead to the inappropriate activation or inactivation of genes, pathways, and processes that drive ageing phenotypes. The running of the developmental software program is reflected in the epigenome, the software’s data area. Human life course drawing by Alice C Magalhaes. Epigenome figure created with BioRender.com