Not especially. Sequencing transposons in particular is tricky, and requires special techniques. It sounds like the authors of that paper used pretty standard techniques, which mostly ignore transposons; they mainly looked at point-mutations.
It does still provide some very interesting tangentially-related data, especially about the phylogeny (i.e. the “loss of clonal diversity” with age). Pretty cool paper overall; this exact methodology plus a transposon-specific sequencing pipeline is exactly the sort of study I’d really like to see.
Does this blood finding change anything here?
Not especially. Sequencing transposons in particular is tricky, and requires special techniques. It sounds like the authors of that paper used pretty standard techniques, which mostly ignore transposons; they mainly looked at point-mutations.
It does still provide some very interesting tangentially-related data, especially about the phylogeny (i.e. the “loss of clonal diversity” with age). Pretty cool paper overall; this exact methodology plus a transposon-specific sequencing pipeline is exactly the sort of study I’d really like to see.