ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2015
Mother-offspring and nest-mate resemblance but no heritability in early-life telomere length in white-throated dippers.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 71 citations in OpenAlex.
- Estimating latent individual demographic heterogeneity using structural equation models.Ecology · 2025Article
- Heritability and age-dependent changes in genetic variation of telomere length in a wild house sparrow population.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Evidence of Paternal Effects on Telomere Length Increases in Early Life.Frontiers in genetics · 2022Article
- The influence of phylogeny and life history on telomere lengths and telomere rate of change among bird species: A meta-analysis.Ecology and evolution · 2021Review
- Heritable variation in telomere length predicts mortality in Soay sheep.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Article
- The Genetic Architecture of Bovine Telomere Length in Early Life and Association With Animal Fitness.Frontiers in genetics · 2019Article
- Bovine telomere dynamics and the association between telomere length and productive lifespan.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Heritability of telomere variation: it is all about the environment!Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Spatio-temporal variation in lifelong telomere dynamics in a long-term ecological study.The Journal of animal ecology · 2018Article
- Article
- No evidence for parental age effects on offspring leukocyte telomere length in free-living Soay sheep.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Age at maturation has sex- and temperature-specific effects on telomere length in a fish.Oecologia · 2017Article
- Telomere length reveals cumulative individual and transgenerational inbreeding effects in a passerine bird.Molecular ecology · 2016Article
- Telomere dynamics may link stress exposure and ageing across generations.Biology letters · 2015Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Telomeres are protective DNA-protein complexes located at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes, whose length has been shown to predict life-history parameters in various species. Although this suggests that telomere length is subject to natural selection, its evolutionary dynamics crucially depends on its heritability. Using pedigree data for a population of white-throated dippers (Cinclus cinclus), we test whether and how variation in early-life relative telomere length (RTL, measured as the number of telomeric repeats relative to a control gene using qPCR) is transmitted across generations. We disentangle the relative effects of genes and environment and test for sex-specific patterns of inheritance. There was strong and significant resemblance among offspring sharing the same nest and offspring of the same cohort. Furthermore, although offspring resemble their mother, and there is some indication for an effect of inbreeding, additive genetic variance and heritability are close to zero. We find no evidence for a role of either maternal imprinting or Z-linked inheritance in generating these patterns, suggesting they are due to non-genetic maternal and common environment effects instead. We conclude that in this wild bird population, environmental factors are the main drivers of variation in early-life RTL, which will severely bias estimates of heritability when not modelled explicitly.
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Registered trials
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