Response to Comment on "Long-Lived Drosophila with Overexpressed dFOXO in Adult Fat Body"

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Abstract
Neither we (5) nor Hwangbo et al. (6) presented mortality rate data. Our conclusion that life span was extended was based on analysis of cumulative survival data. The age specificity of the effect awaits investigation with the necessary large cohorts of flies required for accurate mortality analysis. With the sample sizes (∼200 flies) that we used, day-to-day and age-specific variation in mortality rate is inevitable. Tatar (7) suggests that sporadic high, early mortality in our control groups explains our results. Additionally, he has incorrectly described the data that we provided him, which has led to an overestimation of deaths in our control groups. He states that “for instance, 57 control females died on day 22,” but this number is incorrect. Fifty-seven is the total number of deaths shown in figure 1C in (5); 50 control and 7 experimental females were dead on day 22, rather than the 57 controls.