Meeting Abstract
Identifying physiological mechanisms that underlie senescence across taxonomic groups remains a central question in life history evolution. Telomeres are highly-conserved, repetitive nucleotide sequences that protect the ends of linear chromosomes. Telomeric DNA in many cells shortens over time due to the end-replication problem and damaging events such as oxidative stress. Many studies have reported that this shortening is linked to cellular survival and in some cases, organismal survival. However, we know much less about how telomere dynamics relate to aging rates and maximum lifespans across species. We previously reported that avian species who lose less telomeric repeats as they age have longer lifespans than those who lose more. Here, we investigated telomere length in cross-sectional samples from more than twenty known-aged bird species to determine how telomeres relate to species maximum lifespan. All telomere analyses were measured in erythrocytes in our laboratory using the Telomere Restriction Fragment assay. Similar to our previous report, we found that in this larger sample of species, birds with longer lifespans lose less telomeric repeats per year compared to those species with shorter lifespans. Because closely related lineages share many traits in common, our larger sample of species will also allow us to use comparative analyses to control for shared phylogenetic history.
