ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2003
Telomeres shorten more slowly in long-lived birds and mammals than in short-lived ones.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2003. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 87 papers.
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Who cites it
87 citing papers in PubMed, 286 citations in OpenAlex.
- Biogeographic cline is associated with the global plant telomere length variation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Reproductive Drivers of Temporal Telomere Dynamics in Female Tree Swallows.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Environmental and Genetic Determinants of Early-Life Telomere Length in Tree Swallows.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Review
- CumulativeFrontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2026Article
- Causality of Aging Hallmarks.Aging and disease · 2025Review
- The complex interplay between aging and cancer.Nature aging · 2025Review
- Telomere- and oxidative stress dynamics in Psittacidae species with different longevity trajectories.GeroScience · 2025Article
- A novel carnivorous diet reduces brain telomere length.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Great Tit (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Increased Reproductive Output and Telomere Shortening Following Calcium Supplementation in a Wild Songbird.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Fundamental equations linking methylation dynamics to maximum lifespan in mammals.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Telomere length is longer following diapause in two solitary bee species.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The interaction between ageing and Alzheimer's disease: insights from the hallmarks of ageing.Translational neurodegeneration · 2024Review
- Telomere length and dynamics inPeerJ · 2024Article
- Life history traits and cancer prevalence in birds.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2024Article
- Senescence and the stress axis: a constraint or a trade-off of reproduction in mammals with fast and slow life histories.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Temperature-independent telomere lengthening with age in the long-lived human fish (Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Life history and cancer in birds: clutch size predicts cancer.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Article
27 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We know very little about physiological constraints on the evolution of life-history traits in general, and, in particular, about physiological and molecular adjustments that accompany the evolution of variation in lifespan. Identifying mechanisms that underlie adaptive variation in lifespan should provide insight into the evolution of trade-offs between lifespan and other life-history traits. Telomeres, the DNA caps at the ends of linear chromosomes, usually shorten as animals age, but whether telomere rate of change is associated with lifespan is unknown. We measured telomere length in erythrocytes from five bird species with markedly different lifespans. Species with shorter lifespans lost more telomeric repeats with age than species with longer lifespans. A similar correlation is seen in mammals. Furthermore, telomeres did not shorten with age in Leach's storm-petrels, an extremely long-lived bird, but actually lengthened. This novel finding suggests that regulation of telomere length is associated not only with cellular replicative lifespan, but also with organismal lifespan, and that very long-lived organisms have escaped entirely any telomeric constraint on cellular replicative lifespan.
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