ArticleAmerican journal of physical anthropology2017
Paternal and grandpaternal ages at conception and descendant telomere lengths in chimpanzees and humans.
Article in American journal of physical anthropology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 16 papers.
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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
16 citing papers in PubMed, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- Paternal effects on telomere integrity during the sperm-to-embryo transition.Current opinion in genetics & development · 2025Review
- Evidence of Paternal Effects on Telomere Length Increases in Early Life.Frontiers in genetics · 2022Article
- Parental age at conception on mouse lemur's offspring longevity: Sex-specific maternal effects.PloS one · 2022Article
- Longitudinal evidence that older parents produce offspring with longer telomeres in a wild social bird.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Telomere Dynamics Throughout Spermatogenesis.Genes · 2019Article
- Epigenetic inheritance of telomere length in wild birds.PLoS genetics · 2019Article
- Paternal age at conception effects on offspring telomere length across species-What explains the variability?PLoS genetics · 2019Article
- Paternal Age and Transgenerational Telomere Length Maintenance: A Simulation Model.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Reduced telomere length in offspring of old fathers in a long-lived seabird.Biology letters · 2018Article
- Experimental demonstration that offspring fathered by old males have shorter telomeres and reduced lifespans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- The mitochondrial genome, paternal age and telomere length in humans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- The paternal age at conception effect on offspring telomere length: mechanistic, comparative and adaptive perspectives.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Evaluating minimally invasive sample collection methods for telomere length measurement.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2018Article
- Effects of early-life competition and maternal nutrition on telomere lengths in wild meerkats.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- No evidence for parental age effects on offspring leukocyte telomere length in free-living Soay sheep.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Early life infection, but not breastfeeding, predicts adult blood telomere lengths in the Philippines.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Telomeres are repeating DNA at chromosome ends. Telomere length (TL) declines with age in most human tissues, and shorter TL is thought to accelerate senescence. In contrast, older men have sperm with longer TL; correspondingly, older paternal age at conception (PAC) predicts longer TL in offspring. This PAC-effect could be a unique form of transgenerational genetic plasticity that modifies somatic maintenance in response to cues of recent ancestral experience. The PAC-effect has not been examined in any non-human mammals.
objectivesHere, we examine the PAC-effect in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). The PAC-effect on TL is thought to be driven by continual production of sperm-the same process that drives increased de novo mutations with PAC. As chimpanzees have both greater sperm production and greater sperm mutation rates with PAC than humans, we predict that the PAC-effect on TL will be more pronounced in chimpanzees. Additionally we examine whether PAC predicts TL of grandchildren. MATERIALS AND
methodsTL were measured using qPCR from DNA from blood samples from 40 captive chimpanzees and 144 humans.
resultsAnalyses showed increasing TL with PAC in chimpanzees (p = .009) with a slope six times that in humans (p = .026). No associations between TL and grandpaternal ages were found in humans or chimpanzees-although statistical power was low. DISCUSSION: These results suggest that sperm production rates across species may be a determinant of the PAC-effect on offspring TL. This raises the possibility that sperm production rates within species may influence the TL passed on to offspring.
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