Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Mating is known to accelerate the aging of the opposite sex in a variety of species. A transcriptomic analysis of extracted germlines from mated and unmated Caenorhabditis elegans by Shi and Murphy now identifies a Piwi-interacting RNA-to-Hedgehog signaling pathway that regulates the accelerated aging of hermaphrodites.