| n |
Number of individuals in the cohort |
10000 |
Interested in establishing patterns with high statistical power |
|
μs and σs
|
Mean and standard deviation across individuals of true amount of single-copy sequence present in sample |
10 and 1 |
Variation in amount of DNA present in each sample assumed to be small relative to the mean amount |
| a |
Constant to represent how much more abundant the telomere sequence is than the single-copy sequence in the average genome |
1000 |
Telomeric sequence many-fold more abundant than single-copy gene in genome; Cq values for single-copy gene typically more than double those for telomeric assay in real datasets [20]. |
|
σt
|
True standard deviation across individuals in relative abundance of the telomere sequence in the genome |
0.1 |
Inter-individual standard deviation of adult telomere length measured by terminal restriction fragment is of the order of 10% of the mean (humans: 700bp / 7000bp [24,25]) |
| f |
Fluorescence threshold |
28 |
Produces Cq values in similar range (around 10 to 25) to empirical data [18,20] |
|
σεs and σεt
|
The error σ for single-copy gene and telomere respectively; effectively, the standard deviation when the Cq of the same sample is measured many times |
0 to 0.3 in each case |
Examined range from 0 to well above values likely to be encountered in practice (which may typically be of the order of 0.05, see Results) |
