MPI AGE seminar: "How male reproductive aging scales from individuals to species in African annual killifishes"

About the talk:

Lifespan varies enormously both within and across species, yet the mechanisms driving this variation remain poorly understood. Life-history theory predicts that such variation arises from trade-offs between reproduction and somatic maintenance. Contrary to this expectation, in Nothobranchius furzeri I found that early-life reproductive investment positively covaries with lifespan, suggesting that lifespan heterogeneity reflects intrinsic quality, rather than trade-offs. Yet even high-quality males show marked reproductive decline by mid-age. To follow up on this, I generated offspring from young and mid-age fathers. Offspring produced by mid-age fathers exhibit an earlier onset of senescence, which is unveiled by a reduced lifespan, an accelerated reproductive ageing and a proteome-wide shift toward an older profile, establishing paternal age as an important source of lifespan heterogeneity. To investigate whether the same laws regulate within and among species processes, I leveraged the remarkable lifespan diversity among African annual killifishes and found that, consistent with life-history theory, faster-ageing species heavily invest in early-life reproduction compared to slower-ageing ones. Ongoing work is now targeting germline mutation accumulation as a candidate mechanism linking reproductive decline, transgenerational ageing, and species-level divergence in life-history strategies.

This event is aimed at a specialist audience.