ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2018
Experimental demonstration that offspring fathered by old males have shorter telomeres and reduced lifespans.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pooled it
- Mothers Matter Most: Maternal, but Not Paternal, Age and Inbreeding Affect Nestling Telomere Length in a Wild Passerine.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Persistent maternal age effects on male offspring fitness traits in a wild mammal population.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Hidden Causes of Variation in Offspring Reproductive Value: Negative Effects of Maternal Breeding Age on Offspring Telomere Length Persist Undiminished Across Multiple Generations.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Article
- Linking telomere dynamics to evolution, life history and environmental change: perspectives, predictions and problems.Biogerontology · 2024Review
- Habitat restoration weakens negative environmental effects on telomere dynamics.Molecular ecology · 2022Article
- Separating the effects of paternal age and mating history: Evidence for sex-specific paternal effect in eastern mosquitofish.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- 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
- Should females prefer old males?Evolution letters · 2021Article
- Longitudinal evidence that older parents produce offspring with longer telomeres in a wild social bird.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Telomere attrition with age in a wild amphibian population.Biology letters · 2020Article
- The deteriorating soma and the indispensable germline: gamete senescence and offspring fitness.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Intergenerational effects on offspring telomere length: interactions among maternal age, stress exposure and offspring sex.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- A birth-death model of ageing: from individual-based dynamics to evolutive differential inclusions.Journal of mathematical biology · 2019Article
- Older paternal ages and grandpaternal ages at conception predict longer telomeres in human descendants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Mature sperm small-RNA profile in the sparrow: implications for transgenerational effects of age on fitness.Environmental epigenetics · 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
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Offspring of older parents frequently show reduced longevity, but the mechanisms driving this so-called 'Lansing effect' are unknown. While inheritance of short telomeres from older parents could underlie this effect, studies to date in different species have found mixed results, reporting positive, negative or no association between parental age and offspring telomere length (TL). However, most of the existing evidence is from non-experimental studies in which it is difficult to exclude alternative explanations such as differential survival of parents with different telomere lengths. Here we provide evidence in the zebra finch that offspring from older parents have reduced lifespans. As a first step in disentangling possible causes, we used an experimental approach to examine whether or not we could detect pre-natal paternal effects on offspring TL. We found that zebra finch embryos fathered by old males have shorter telomeres than those produced by the same mothers but with younger fathers. Since variation in embryonic TL persists into post-natal life, and early life TL is predictive of longevity in this species, this experimental study demonstrates that a paternally driven pre-natal TL reduction could at least in part underlie the reduced lifespan of offspring from older parents.
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Registered trials
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