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Ageing

Variety in old age

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 9, pages 88–89 (2008)Cite this article

Natural populations of Soay sheep and red deer have been intensely studied by population geneticists and behavioural ecologists, so the authors took advantage of these resources to study the genetics of ageing. Animals are marked at birth and tracked throughout their lifetime, and molecular typing allows the construction of pedigrees.

For each individual in the study, the authors calculated a measure of its contribution to overall population size in a given year. This fitness measure incorporates both survival and fecundity. As expected, this quantity increased with age until after maturity and then declined as the animal senesced. Quantitative genetic models were applied to this data to partition the variance into additive genetic and environmental effects. By splitting the animals into age groups, they showed that the genetic variation increased with age: in red deer it was three times higher in the oldest age group than in the youngest, and in sheep an additive genetic effect was only seen in the older group.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Wilson, A. J. et al. Evidence for a genetic basis of aging in two wild vertebrate populations. Curr. Biol. 17, 2136–2142 (2007)

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FURTHER READING

  1. Bishop, N. A. & Guarente, L. Genetic links between diet and lifespan: shared mechanisms from yeast to humans. Nature Rev. Genet. 8, 835–844 (2007)

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  2. Longo, V. D., Mitteldorf, J. & Skulachev, V. P. Programmed and altruistic ageing. Nature Rev. Genet. 6, 866–872 (2005)

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Authors
  1. Patrick Goymer
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Goymer, P. Variety in old age. Nat Rev Genet 9, 88–89 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg2304

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg2304

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