Alex Wilkins is a writer.
The big brown bats may age slower.
Jay Ondreicka is a stock photographer.
Bats may age slower when they are inactive. They are the second type of animal found to do this, the other being marmots, which suggests that the mechanism could be common among hibernators.
Steve Horvath and his colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles discovered that yellow-bellied marmots have a slowed epigenetic clock. Horvath created a clock that calculates an individual's biological age by measuring the amount of chemical labels on an animal's genetic material.
The same technique was used to find that a species of brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus) had reduced aging markers when they were awake.
The team analysed the bats' genetic material. The bats were active in the summer and winter.
The nice thing about our system is that we can catch the same animals in different times of the year. It is very controlled for each individual. You can just see what happens.
Around 3000 epigenetic markers were found to be different between the active and hibernating animals.
Three-quarters of these were associated with genes that switch off, which may lead to the suppression of certain bodily processes.
The rest of the quarter were turning on genes that control or regulate metabolism.
The discovery adds weight to the idea that hibernation slows the aging process across a wide range of species.
It helps provide important insight into the mechanisms that underlie hibernation's ability to slow the aging process.
Christopher Turbill says that it makes sense that hibernating animals would age more slowly, as this could extend the period when they could successfully reproduce.
The Royal Society B's journal is titled "Poems of the Royal Society B".
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