Publication Title
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Document Type
Article
Department or Program
Biology
Publication Date
3-5-2018
Keywords
Ageing, Bird, Comparative analysis, Lifespan, Senescence, Telomeres
Abstract
Telomeres are highly conserved regions of DNA that protect the ends of linear chromosomes. The loss of telomeres can signal an irreversible change to a cell’s state, including cellular senescence. Senescent cells no longer divide and can damage nearby healthy cells, thus potentially placing them at the crossroads of cancer and ageing. While the epidemiology, cellular and molecular biology of telomeres are well studied, a newer field exploring telomere biology in the context of ecology and evolution is just emerging.With work to date focusing on how telomere shortening relates to individual mortality, less is known about how telomeres relate to ageing rates across species. Here, we investigated telomere length in cross-sectional samples from 19 bird species to determine how rates of telomere loss relate to interspecific variation in maximum lifespan. We found that bird species with longer lifespans lose fewer telomeric repeats each year compared with species with shorter lifespans. In addition, phylogenetic analysis revealed that the rate of telomere loss is evolutionarily conserved within bird families. This suggests that the physiological causes of telomere shortening, or the ability to maintain telomeres, are features that may be responsible for, or co-evolved with, different lifespans observed across species.
Recommended Citation
Tricola GM, Simons MJP, Atema E, Boersma PD, Boughton RK, Brown JL, Dearborn DC, Divoky G, Eimes J, Huntington CE, Kitaysky AS, Juola FA, Lank DB, Litwa HP, Mulder EGA, Nisbet ICT, Okanoya K, Safran RJ, Schoech SJ, Schreiber EA, Thompson PM, Verhulst S, Wheelwright NT, Winkler DW, Young R, Vleck CM, Haussmann MF. 2018. The rate of telomere loss is related to maximum lifespan in birds. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 373:20160445. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0445
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
PubMed ID
29335369
Copyright Note
Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
Required Publisher's Statement
Original version is available from the publisher at: https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0445